


ain't no place like home

by SashaSea (SHCombatalade)



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Character Death, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Gen, M/M, Stephen King's IT fusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:00:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 55,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23077456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SashaSea
Summary: “Can’t we just," Nicky waves his hands through the air a little bit like a magic wand and a whole lot like a bad dance choreography, “hold hands and Expecto Patronum this musty bitch back to hell?”Andrew glances down at sleeves that are woefully free of hidden blades and have been for years, and clenches his fists instead. “Jesus Christ. It is with all the confidence of the last twenty years that I say my life would be unquestionably better if I had never met any of you.”“Yeah,” Neil agrees. “Expecto Patronum is for Dementors. Riko is clearly a Boggart, we need to hold hands and Riddikulus his ass.”Woefully free of knives, and of any memory of ever tracing the scars that loop Neil’s skin. “I take it back, Neil can stay. The rest of you are on thin fucking ice.”
Relationships: Kevin Day & Neil Josten, Kevin Day/Thea Muldani, Matt Boyd/Danielle "Dan" Wilds, Neil Josten & Andrew Minyard, Neil Josten & The Foxes (All For The Game), Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 87
Kudos: 229





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> have you ever been like, damn, i really wish someone out there would write an entire "Stephen King's IT but the kids are the foxes!" au?? i mean, literally no one has EVER been like that.... but i did it anyway

> **The Dynamite Duo: Exy’s Superstar Pair Count Down to Their Fifth (and Final??) Olympics**
> 
> **by Kelly Mitchell (January 23, 2020)**
> 
> Maris and Mantle. Shaq and Kobe. Hernandez and Iniesta. Montana and Rice. Kurri and Gretzky. Every professional sport has its pair who sweep the field as part of an unstoppable duo, and Exy is no different. Even if you’ve been living under a rock for the past few decades, even if you’ve never gained interest in America’s bastardized racquet sport, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t know about the dynamite duo of Josten and Day.
> 
> It’s strange now to remember that they were rivals for so long. Picked up while they were still in college, they spent the first five seasons of their now illustrious careers on opposing teams (Josten played two seasons with Denver and three with Boston, and Day has, of course, famously been captaining their Sacramento-based team since his first season). The “dynamite” part of their media moniker came first from the sparks that flew whenever they faced off. It wasn’t just that they were, for once, evenly matched – it’s no secret that the two are in a class all their own even among other professional players. There’s not yet an Exy Hall of Fame but there are rumors that the inauguration will be in the upcoming 2020-2021 season and there’s no question that these two will be the first names honored. Between their twenty years of play in Exy’s total thirty years of existence and their twelve combined gold medals (and eighteen championship titles, and eleven world records, and nine international cup wins, and—) they’re clearly the best of the best. But they’re also, and always have been, perhaps the most interesting players to watch as well.
> 
> There’s an almost effortless chemistry between the two that hasn’t always been friendly, but it’s always been palpable. They were in each other’s faces and all over each other’s post-games presses long before they were teammates, but from the moment they first stepped onto the court as fresh-faced twenty-year-olds they’ve been almost as obsessed with each other as we’ve been with them. They famously came to blows in one of the first games they played back in the 2000-2001 season (watch the video Here!, I promise you that it’s worth it), before Josten just as famously dropped sticks only three games later to brawl his own teammate after a particularly nasty check left Day with a sprained wrist (again, watch the video Here!) and on the bench for two weeks. When the decision was made to trade Josten to California after Boston’s disastrous championship loss back in 2005, sports fans prepared themselves for any possible reaction from the new striker pair. Instead, we got the duo of Josten and Day – as good as they might have been before, they’ve been even better together.
> 
> I’m sitting down with the Golden State Grizzlies’ star strikers Kevin Day and Neil Josten two weeks after the (unsurprising) news that they have been named co-captains of the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympic team. It is each man’s fifth Olympic game, and rumors are flying that it could be their last. At 40 years they’re both some of the oldest players still on the court, and with further rumors of the Hall of Fame ceremony, it seems like a perfect end to a long and largely perfect career.
> 
> We meet in a quiet downtown restaurant, neither of them ever known for their formality, and while Day walks in exactly two minutes to our agreed meeting time of 11:30am (At 40 he’s still an imposing figure, 6’2 and in near Jason Momoa shape. His black hair is just starting to grey at the temples, and there’s not a single line or wrinkle on his face. I’m 32 years old and I look as though I could be his mother next to the almost eternal youth and vigor he projects. He’s dressed down in jeans and a team jacket, and he’s on the phone when he enters. ‘Thea,’ he mouthes apologetically, referring of course to his wife of eleven years, fellow professional Exy star Thea Muldani-Day. She’s currently pregnant with their second child, so he’s forgiven the discourtesy.) Josten scrambles through the door at 11:31 on the dot looking like he’s run the entire distance. Blessed with an even stronger case of the same eternal youth as his friend, Josten still looks exactly the same as he had in his draft photo, only now he has the money to afford the stylist to get him out of the notoriously terrible clothes he was spotted in in past years. His curly hair is still penny red, and his eyes are still so electric blue that there have been countless articles (and countless more internet blogs) devoted entirely to rhapsodizing their color. He grins at both me and Day, yells a greeting to Thea through the phone, and then our casual interview begins.
> 
> **How are you both today?**
> 
> N: Fine! Doing fine, I just...
> 
> K: He forgot about this
> 
> N, laughing: I forgot about this
> 
> K: That’s what Thea was calling about, letting me know she’d had to wake this idiot up
> 
> I laugh with them. **I’m sure the internet will be thrilled to hear you’ve moved back in, Neil.** (The pair have, to the delight of fans, lived together on and off for the last fifteen years.)
> 
> N: I haven’t! (Kevin laughs again) I swear! I still like, have a house and I spend.... time there! But T’s having more trouble getting around and Amalia is so active, I’m like.... Kev what’s that show?
> 
> K: What show?
> 
> N: With the family and the house and the fun uncle
> 
> K: You think you’re an Uncle Jesse, Neil? Really??
> 
> N: I’m their Uncle Jesse
> 
> **She’s due soon, right?**
> 
> K: Few weeks
> 
> N: April 3rd
> 
> (They reply at the exact same time, and then glare at each other before both smiling. They’re lucky I’ve learned not to film their interviews or they would be all over the stranger side of Twitter in under an hour.)
> 
> **You prepared to be a father of two?**
> 
> K, laughing: I’m already a father of two. I mean, let’s be real, I’m basically Neil’s dad
> 
> N: I swear to god, Kevin, if the internet starts making daddy jokes about us because of this interview, I will literally murder you
> 
> K: F— Neil, you’re so f—ing gross
> 
> (I would like to remind readers again that these are both 40-year-old, multi-millionaire athletes and not actually a pair of teenage boys.)
> 
> **It’s a perfect segue. Speaking of “daddy”** (They both groan) **you just had your third run in ESPN’s The Body Issue. Will we ever be blessed by one from you, Neil?**
> 
> N: We all hope not! But seriously, no thank you. I’m the brains here, Kev’s the beauty
> 
> K: I’m the brains too, dumbass
> 
> N: He’s right, I’m dumb as hell (They both laugh, fondly. Even when they played for opposing teams there was always a camaraderie between them. It’s what makes them so magnetic.) Fortunately for you all, I have no plans for it. We’re not gonna charge people for this
> 
> (This is a gesture from head to toe, encompassing Neil’s entire body. He’s lean and tan and in mind-bogglingly good shape, and there are hundreds of fan accounts dedicated to what his thighs look like in his uniform shorts. But he is likely referring to the scars that cover nearly all of his visible skin, leftovers from a childhood accident.)
> 
> **I say this in the most professional capacity I can: You’re a good-looking dude, Neil. And I know you’ve spoken in the past about the stigma and self-consciousness that comes from visible scars like yours, but I mean it. I would buy at least two copies.** (Neil laughs. He knows one of those copies would be for my wife.)
> 
> N: I just meant that I’ve spent 20 years in a sport where I spend 90% of my time in short shorts and varying amounts of shirt coverage. I’m sure the internet can composite together a tasteful spread for you, Kelly
> 
> K: He just doesn’t want people to see his tramp stamp (Neil laughs again, and playfully punches his friend on the arm.) It’s a dolphin
> 
> N: F— you, it’s not a dolphin
> 
> **I can’t help but notice you don’t deny having a tattoo, though.**
> 
> N: Damn it, Kevin! (We all laugh, clearly joking.)
> 
> **We sort of touched on it, but can I ask? About the accident?**
> 
> N: Yeah, I— (He takes a moment to think. Kevin slings an arm around his shoulders in support.) I’m okay talking about it. I mean, I don’t even really remember it, so.... Freak accident, you know? I was just a kid, I got thrown through the front window. Weird to think that’s what saved me, you know? (He refers to his mother, who was with him in their home when a gas line exploded. I won’t make him talk about that.) Anyway, here I am
> 
> K: Unfortunately for me
> 
> N: F— you, I’m your best friend and the entire world knows it
> 
> (They really do.)
> 
> **Speaking of, you two have been friends for quite some time now.**
> 
> N: Forever
> 
> K: Too long
> 
> (Kevin’s disgust is hardly believable, given the fact that he’s allowed Neil to move into his home with his pregnant wife, to play Uncle Jesse to his five-year-old, and the internet’s now famous photo series of the number of times the two have been seen sporting fan shirts and jerseys of the other’s number #Josday)
> 
> **Somehow that’s also a perfect segue: you two have been named co-captains to the US Team for the, what, fourth time?**
> 
> K: Yeah, fourth time
> 
> N: Kevin was solo captain that first time, it’s probably why we lost
> 
> K: We took the silver, Neil!!
> 
> N: Yeah, but we’ve gotten gold every time I’ve been your co, so it seems like I’m the common denominator here
> 
> K: You were _on_ the team when we took second, f— you
> 
> N, stage whispering: He’s useless without me
> 
> **Hopefully he won’t have to play without you again, which brings me to another one of those burning questions. Let’s talk retirement rumors.**
> 
> N: Let’s not
> 
> K: Why is everyone so ready to send us out to pasture?
> 
> N: Because you’re old, Kev
> 
> K: I am literally one month older than you
> 
> N: Five minutes ago you were basically my dad, and now you’re only a month older than me? Figure your s— out, Day
> 
> K: Every day that I know you is another day I wish the universe had killed you during your childhood
> 
> N: Kill me yourself, coward
> 
> (The interview never quite gets back on track after that, and it’s only that evening as I type up my transcript of the talk that I realize how completely brilliant they were in derailing me after my question about a potential retirement for one or both of them. I guess that’s something that we’ll be keeping our eyes on as we get closer to the end of the regular season, and to the Summer Olympics in Tokyo.)

When his phone starts buzzing at eight in the morning, Neil assumes it’s Rebecca with some sort of reprimand for the article that had gone up to The Bee’s sports blog – usually his publicist is, well, not _fine_ but at least tolerant of him being himself (sometimes she even enjoys it, especially when Kevin or Thea are involved, because somehow the same responses that make him an asshole in solo interviews make him quirky and fun when one of his best friends are included), but she had specifically ordered him to avoid the subject of retirement before the end of the regular season. Mostly because she didn’t trust him to not go on the record with an emphatic _fuck no_ , he was _not_ retiring, not when they were all still discussing it.

( _They_ were his doctors and his coaches and his public relations staff and, of course, his personal team of Kevin and Thea. So far, no agreement had been reached.)

It’s only eight in the morning and he’s probably about to be yelled at, gently, but he answers anyway because he’s already been awake for three hours, and because he doesn’t actually dislike Rebecca. She’s good at her job and she doesn’t try to change him too much, and most of the time she actually has nice things to say about whatever effort he’s made to the media that week. It’s only when he catches the number on the screen – not Rebecca’s, her contact information is saved, and not Sacramento either. It’s an unknown 304 number which, according to his iPhone’s best guess, is simply the state of West Virginia calling. – that he remembers the email she’d sent last night, that Sports Illustrated was planning on reaching out to him for a more official interview than just the local Sacramento reporters he’s come to know.

“Josten,” he aims for professional, but realizes halfway through the greeting that whoever is calling probably _knows_ who they’re trying to reach, so it comes out a little bit more like a question, like maybe he’s the one who needs clarification.

There’s a moment’s pause, and then a woman’s soft voice. “Neil Josten?”

Maybe he’d been wrong, maybe they didn’t actually know who they were trying to reach. He’s supposed to be on all sorts of no-call lists, pays a lot of money to _not_ get the random sales pitches, but no system is perfect. Best case scenario, it’s a telemarketer in for quite the surprise. Worst case, it’s a very dedicated fan and he gets a new number. “Yes?”

Another pause, this one couching a sigh of relief. “It’s Renee.”

He tries to remember if the email had mentioned any name, a contact that might be reaching out to him – he can’t recall. Normally Rebecca fields the actual negotiations with him and just tells him when and where to be, but even when she doesn’t he’s never had to deal with what sounds like an intern who isn’t quite sure what she wants from him. “Good morning, Renee,” he tries for charming, because if Rebecca’s already going to rip him a new one for the retirement thing he doesn’t want to add ‘rude to Sports Illustrated’ to her cache of ammunition.

“Renee Walker,” she says with more confidence in her voice.

He nods, and jots the name down on a scrap of paper he finds on the counter. “Neil Josten.”

“No, Neil,” and now she doesn’t sound soft, or questioning. She sounds frustrated, and almost… fond? “It’s _Renee Walker_.” The name means nothing to him. “From Palmetto.” And now, suddenly, it means _everything_. In the three syllables it takes for her to form the name of the town he grew up in – it never bothered him before, that he couldn’t quite remember the details of his childhood. His therapist had blamed it on the accident, the one that killed his mother, told him it was likely he repressed most of the rest of it as a protective measure. – an entire lifetime he hadn’t realized he’d forgotten hits him like a rocket and leaves him doubled over the counter, gasping for breath. Then, as the full extent of what exactly he’d forgotten (and it wasn’t the accident, he knows that for sure. It might be repression or it might be actually, literally, magic, but it wasn’t his house burning down that did it. His house didn’t even burn down, his mother didn’t even, _oh god_ —) slots into place, he leans over and vomits into the sink.

“ _Renee_ ,” he gasps, and chokes, and sobs a little bit. He hasn’t been able to remember her in twenty years, not since he left Palmetto, not since—

“You need to come home,” she says gently, but firmly. She’d always been that way, silk and steel all in one, and up until he crossed the bridge that separated Palmetto from the rest of the world and promptly forgot everything about her, she’d been one of his best friends. He knows he needs to come home, and he knows why, because if it’s all coming back to him now, like this, _oh god_. “It’s started up again.”

* * *

> _Do you remember?_ the old man on the street had asked. He had been crazy before the shades came and a regular Cassandra after, preaching warnings they could not heed from his crumbling pulpit at the corner of 42nd and… had it been so long? The crossroad had been all but forgotten. He stared with milky eyes too long without sight or hope or happiness at those who hurried past, calling after them in his reedy, old man voice. _Do you remember?_
> 
> Gabriel remembers.
> 
> He remembers the smell of urine and vomit splashed across the floor of the bus station when he took his first steps into the city, fifteen and running away from home with nothing in his pockets but the hopeless ideal of opportunities. He remembers the stench of the overflowing dumpsters in the darkened side streets, the seductive salt smell of the pretzel stand where he first met Berto, where everything changed. The honking cars outside of the seedy hotel rooms, sleeping under the molded sheets of poverty while counting the loose coins of his morals between bouts of hunger. Gunshots haunting the silent moments of the nighttime symphonies and praying to a god he didn’t believe in that he wouldn’t be next, and yet, in some dark recess of his mind, hoping he might be.
> 
> He remembers pieces and scraps of what he thought had been a life, before the shades came. Slivers in a shattered jigsaw, warped beyond recognition and never again to fit together. What he remembers is as lost as he is, desperate to vanish.
> 
> “No,” he finally answers the cubes of ice that swirl in the dregs of his bourbon. “I don’t remember.”
> 
> The plane lifts. The fog receives them. For a moment, the horrifying tilting sensation turns like the world beneath them, upside down, as if they move not toward the future but instead writhe caught in the past. The plane hits another jolt of turbulence and he feels the bags above him shift, feels the world open up beneath him, sees the ships as clearly as if there were no mist pressing around them, sailing away to the untouchable horizon. He envisions the plane descending, nose-diving into the ocean, crashing among the ships exiled from port, forever a ghost searching for a non-existent home.
> 
> Gabriel looks over at his seatmate, at her lips moving lightning quick, at the knowledge he didn’t have, and the words she repeats like a mantra – Not crumble into the sea – warding off death like a crucifix to sin. No, he amends quietly, mouthing the newfound prayer along with her. Not death. Non-entity. Non-existence. Nothingness.
> 
> Slowly, incredibly, the plane levels out. Silence descends. Sweet, almost forgotten silence devoid of screams or Hail Mary’s.
> 
> Gabriel squeezes her hand and smiles at her eyes, still tightly clenched against the ugly reality of the world they leave behind. “Mona,” he urges her gently. “Open your eyes. Look outside. Open your eyes.”
> 
> “Is it beautiful?”
> 
> He feels something shift then, feels the shriveled parts of him expand in new ways as he takes in the vastness of light that crests the clouds before them. “Heartbreakingly so.”
> 
> And Mona opens her eyes to the blinding sun of the horizon.
> 
> – Excerpt, _Sweetbriar_ , the often over-looked debut novel of NYT Bestseller A.J. Spear

The thing is, Andrew knows he’s not what people expect him to be. Either they know him as a New York Time Bestselling Author (whose works critics have praised for their emotional, sweeping depictions of the best and worst of the human condition, whatever that means), or they know him from his time on the force – either way, whether they expect a heroic police detective or a reclusive eccentric novelist, they’re usually rather surprised when they get, well, _him_.

“ _Please_ tell me you’re actually wearing something that doesn’t make you look like a hired killer,” his assistant, Ethan, whirls into his apartment like a hurricane. It’s ten in the morning and he’s due at The Book Escape at noon, but Ethan is always bursting with exactly two things: enthusiasm, and opinions. It’s usually a matter of an hour or so before he allows Andrew out in public most days, ostensibly to keep him from tanking his entire career when he shows up to events looking like he’s potentially one of the criminals he writes about. “And _please_ tell me you’re not wearing The Shoes.”

He is.

The thing is, Andrew _knows_ The Shoes are terrible. He hates them almost as much as Ethan does (who hates them because they’re ugly, and unprofessional, and just completely go against both the image they’ve cultivated and the one Andrew maintains at home), but they’re terribly comfortable and he is, inexplicably, terribly fond of them. They’re running shoes, which alone is strange because Andrew hates running – he hated it when he was a detective and he hates it even more now that he makes his living in a more sedentary and lavish setting. He’s never willingly run a day in his life. They’re also an eye sore gradient of colors, neon orange at the toes fading somehow into chartreuse at the heel, and if he somehow found himself with a gun pressed to his head and the person at the trigger demanding he list even _one_ redeeming quality of them, he would welcome the occasion to be free of them finally.

“Aaron bought these for me,” he lies with the same casual indifference he always has when his brother comes up – they’ve never been close, and never will be.

Ethan looks away from his phone long enough to raise an eyebrow in clear judgement; he’s Andrew’s longest lasting assistant, mostly because he’s just enough of a bitch to not care that Andrew is too. “If that were true you would have thrown them away as soon as you saw them. Just admit that you bought the ugly ass dad shoes and go change them before we have to go.”

His cellphone rings from its charging station in the kitchen, which wouldn’t normally draw him short – he doesn’t leave it in his office or his bedroom, desperate to create any place that feels peaceful in any way (and it doesn’t work, not really. He might be phone and mostly-tech free in his private spaces but he still doesn’t feel relaxed when he’s home. When he’s anywhere, really. It’s not even that he’s stressed, or worried; it’s more that Andrew can’t remember a time when he’s felt much of anything at all, just a constant background stage of _eh_ , which everyone he’s brought it up to tell him is actually just normal, apparently) – except that the only person who calls him with any regularity is Ethan, who stands in the kitchen and stares at the phone with the same sort of disbelief that Andrew does when he approaches.

“Robo call,” he finally pronounces, and returns his attention to his own phone – it’s not rudeness that has him glued to it in the hours before most public events, but loyalty. He’s constantly checking in with venues to ensure that they’re properly set up for Andrew and his idiosyncrasies, that they understand that no, he’s not joking, please do not try to shake his hand or even stand too close or—

He ignores the phone and watches the call drop. Robo call.

And then it rings again, the same unknown number.

“You gonna get that?” Ethan points, still glued to his phone, but when Andrew’s rings again and _again_ , he glances over with a tiny pinch of concern around his mouth. “AJ? You want me to deal with this?”

He doesn’t. He does. Andrew doesn’t know what he wants, except to try and explain how there’s a weighted, sinking feeling in his gut and a dark, clawing feeling in his throat and how he hasn’t had a panic attack ever in his life but he thinks he’s having one right now and _he doesn’t know why_. Instead, he bites out a painful grimace that could pass as a smile, and he answers the phone. “Why are you calling me?”

The dread he can feeling looming in the hollow places of his body where he’s never felt much of anything at all intensifies. “Because I’ve missed you,” comes the voice that he knows immediately belongs to Renee Walker, the best friend he hadn’t, up until just now, been aware that he even _had_ , because at that exact moment in time Andrew realizes that he’s forgotten nearly every aspect of his life up until this morning. “And because I need you to come back home.”

And then, like waking up from a dream, Andrew _remembers_.

He’s aware, distantly, that Renee is still on the line; her voice in his ear is familiar and grounding, the same quiet litany that kept him sane during those terrible teenage years. Now, so far removed, the familiarity is grating. It feels like sandpaper against exposed nerves, the way she _knows him_ , when he’s suddenly realized that, for the last twenty years, he hasn’t known himself.

The phone is placed gently on the counter, and then he rolls up his sleeves. He’s never wondered, not once, why he never wears t-shirts or why he never exposes his forearms even in the summer heat – never wondered, but now he knows. _Oh_ , he thinks as he finally allows himself to make eye contact with the bands of scars that wrap like silver shackles around his wrists. He feels divorced from his own existence, like he blinked his eyes open to a body he didn’t know he was in, and somehow never once questioned why every single moment of his life slipped through his fingers as soon as it ended, syrupy like a dream. So this is what it feels like, his teeth clench, finally being awake. Like he would give anything to go back to sleep.

“Andrew?” Renee calls his name for what must be a repeated time, concerned now, like she knows what he’s thinking.

She can’t be – the man Renee knew doesn’t exist anymore, if he ever did. Or maybe the man Andrew knew doesn’t, or didn’t, or— “Natalie Renee Shields,” he snarls the name across the line to her, lashing out with the reminder of everything her father and his name did to her. It’s only fair, he thinks – up until her voice he’d had no reminders of Palmetto. Of Drake. Of Cass. Of ever feeling anything so strongly that he wishes more than anything to feel nothing at all ever again. For the past two decades, Andrew can’t remember wanting anything – he’s existed, he hasn’t lived. He also, for the only time in living memory, hasn’t wanted to die. “However you got this number, delete it. I never want to hear from you or about you again.”

“Be safe,” she acknowledges, and hangs up.

Ethan, the hint of concern having grown to something overwhelming, appears exactly three feet from Andrew’s elbow. “AJ,” his voice is soft, and familiar, and he _loathes it_. “AJ, are you okay?”

He doesn’t think that he’s ever, any moment of his life, been okay. He knows for sure he’ll never be again.

“Ethan,” he managers calmly. Evenly. A quiet in the eye of a hurricane. “I need to cancel... everything.”

Loyalty has him nodding, not questioning. “Is everything okay? Is it Aaron?” In the end, as it had been for most of their childhood, it’s mention of his twin that breaks him. In a single, unhurried movement, Andrew grabs a stool from the low counter top of his kitchen island and hurls it full force into the glass panels of the cabinets. Everything shatters. Next is a pewter bowl, denting the plaster of the wall, and finally the mirror by the living room – that one he strikes so hard that he feels something in his hand shift, and then something deeper in his bones when the pain is suddenly the only thing that feels familiar to him.

“Just cancel everything and get the fuck out of my apartment,” he doesn’t raise a hand to Ethan, because he might not be the Andrew of twenty minutes ago but he’s also not the Andrew of twenty years ago; it’s a near thing, but the instinctive drive for violence seems to only apply to himself. He does yell though, something broken and feral, and he knows exactly how he sounds by how quickly Ethan bolts for the front door.

Through all of this, he’s managed to keep hold of his phone. Without a moment of hesitation he dials the number that, up until the horrors of his childhood stole everything from him that it hadn’t already taken in his youth, had been a second nature to him. He doesn’t even realize it, how his fingers press a familiar pattern of buttons that he can’t name, can only feel, like maybe the rest of him forgot but certain muscles never did – the tones of a number no longer in service sound quietly in his ruined kitchen, and he wants to laugh only to find he seems to have forgotten how. Of course he doesn’t have the same number from high school. He probably doesn’t even remember high school, if the path Andrew’s life has taken reflects anything else.

 _Fuck_ , he sinks to the floor as he finally realizes why exactly he’s been so drawn to these ugly fucking shoes. _Of course_.

In the quiet lull between everything he hasn’t been able to feel for half his life now boiling over and retreating to simmer under his skin lie an itch he’s tried so hard to carve out, the phone in his hand pings with a familiar notification. Twitter. Without looking he knows exactly who, and what, it is, because in addition to suddenly realizing that he doesn’t know himself at all, he also realizes that there’s a person out there he suddenly knows disturbingly well on a very subconscious level.

He thumbs the app open to his messages, takes a deep breath, and feels the entire world right itself on a single word.

 **Neil Josten** **☑️** **@njos10**

  
Drew

* * *

He and Kevin don’t speak for the entire seven-hour flight from Sacramento to Charleston. It’s not an uncomfortable silence, or even a wholly intentional one – instead, it just seems that after thirty-five years of a forty-year life spent living out of the other’s pockets, they’ve finally run out of things to say.

(There had been plenty of things to say earlier, right after Neil had tossed the phone and most of the breakfast he’d eaten that morning into the garbage can. Renee had given him solid eighteen minutes to grieve all that had been lost, and found, before she’d set Kevin loose from his own terrible reminder, and he was at the house within another ten. There had been screaming – and heavy drinking – on both of their ends before everything had finally crested in a wave of relieved, hysterical laughter. “You sat next to me in kindergarten,” Kevin said with something almost like awe in his voice. “We had sleepovers every Saturday until we were fifteen.”

“I was the best man at your wedding,” Neil had grinned in return, “and I think we still have sleepovers when we have away games.”

Somehow, despite anywhere between fifteen and twenty years being caught in the other’s orbit, it feels strange to be sitting like this, tangled limbs and shoulders bumping in a heap on the kitchen floor. It feels too much like the childhood they had forgotten they shared, and the later years they were robbed of forming themselves. “What the _fuck_ ,” Kevin finally addresses the very large, completely supernatural elephant in the room, spinning an empty bottle of Jack Daniels in between his hands – it’s only been the last hour or so that they even recognized the presence of the matching ropy, jagged scars that had otherwise inexplicably crossed their palms, let alone known where they came from. “We fought a goddamn _demon clown_ when we were kids and – _fuck_ , Neil, we forgot our friends. We’ve known Danielle Wilds since we were like five years old and we play her team at least twice a season and there’s just _zero_ recognition there. We’ve lost like, every core memory. Who even _are we_?”

Neil shrugs, feeling hollow and removed despite the lingering panic he can taste alongside the bile in the back of his throat. “So we grew up together in fucking Murdertown, USA, and then we moved away for college and like, forgot literally everything ever. Plus side, we didn’t forget how to play together.”

The empty bottle clatters to the linoleum. “Neil, I forgot my _dad_. Fuck, I don’t even know if he’s still _alive_.”

“He is.”

Kevin looks over and down at him, green eyes only slightly murky from the alcohol – mostly, they’re red from the tears. “Fuck you.”

He’s drunk, and tired, and completely ready to just to bed and wake up in a world where this has all been a strange and terrible dream; unlocking his phone is a herculean effort, but he shoves it under Kevin’s nose anyway. “David Wymack, aged sixty-eight. Current address 931 Red Fox Lane, Palmetto—” The phone is snatched from his hand by Kevin’s, which shake. “He’s still there.”

“Oh my god,” Kevin breathes in, shaky, and out, wetly. “Oh my god, that’s my _dad_.”

Neil nods; he knows the feeling. Wymack had been the only stable adult in any of their lives, after a time, and he might not have been a father figure to them all but he’d been _something._ The only house they’d ever felt safe at had been Kevin’s, and Neil suddenly remembers how he’d all but moved in there that summer, after— “We can go see him,” he decides. “You know, when we go back.”

There’s no question of them not going – not even Kevin, weeks away from a second child. Along with the answers they never knew they were missing they’ve regained a sudden, rock-solid sense of how important this is. Thea might never get it, but she’ll understand. “Where did you even get this?” Kevin asks instead, because for all the things they’ve suddenly found to talk about – all twenty or fifteen or thirty-five years of things – the largest and most important of them has gone unquestionably unspoken.

“From Drew.” Hours ago, he hadn’t even remembered Andrew existed. Now the words roll off his tongue as easily as air, as breathing. “He’s a retired police officer, still has access to the databases. I asked him to look it up, knew you needed it.”

He didn’t expect weeping or gratitude, not really; he knows Kevin too well for that doubly so now, and knows it’s not in his nature. He didn’t, however, expect the sudden smugness of his expression, either. “Of course,” Kevin grins lazily, drunk enough to fall into whatever personas they’ve haunted these last twenty years. “You have your memories back for _half an hour_ and of course you the first person you call is Andrew.”

Of course it was – easy as breathing. “You _do_ remember that Andrew is like, objectively my best friend, right?”

The lazy grin widens, not falls, at the admission – the Kevin of their fifteen year performance is Neil Josten’s best friend, but Andrew had always been Nathaniel’s. Suddenly, there’s a very large and very clear distinction. “Fuck you, I’m totally your best friend,” he nudges their shoulders together when he says it. “Like, we’ve always been Kevin and Neil. But also, you were always AndrewandNeil.” He says it like there’s a difference, though Neil can’t figure out what it is. Instead, he just laughs and nods and they go back to drinking and not talking about things.)

“Palmetto,” Neil says his first words out loud since the plane, reading the sign as their rental car crosses the bridge that serves as the only way in or out of town; Palmetto is nestled in the valley at the convergence of two rivers, with the point of the waters meeting on the eastern side beneath the bridge that enters town. To the west, behind the town, is the otherwise impassable forest wilderness of the Appalachian Trail. It’s a small town of only two-thousand and some people, isolated on all sides by natural borders, and buried at its heart is the lair of a demon who feeds on fear and despair and children. “God, I’m glad I forgot this fucking place.”

They’re meeting the others – the others! Neil woke up one morning an orphan, an only child, who lived most of his time with his best friend’s family because it was the closest thing he’d ever found to the feeling he thought might be home, and had gone to bed that night with nine people who had known him his entire life, who had bled with him and for him, and who loved him unconditionally. Somehow, the idea of seeing them again was almost scarier than the actual horrors that brought them back. – at Palmetto’s only Chinese restaurant, the same place they had gone at least once a week all through middle and high school. It was like their own private joke, how wildly and commercially racist the place was – half the menu was food from Japan, not China, and the wait staff always bowed to Renee and the twins when they came in (despite Renee being Korean and the twins being half-Vietnamese, and all of them being born and raised in America with only the vaguest concept of the culture heritage).

When they pull into the lot, more than half empty – it’s not just the restaurants of Palmetto that have always been casually racist, but for rural West Virginia there’s at least the effort made to include the concept of diversity. There’s a handful of cars parked closest to the building, and under the lights of the garish red and green sign, two people are standing comfortably close in an uncomfortable silence. Neil feels his heart rate pick up before he can even see their faces.

“What the _fuck,_ ” Nicky Hemmick greets when they walks over to join them; he’s as tall as Kevin now, and his curly hair still brushes his collarbones like it did back when they were kids. He doesn’t hesitate as he reaches out with grabbing hands to pull Neil and Kevin in for a bruising hug. “How the fuck did every last one of you get _even hotter_ over the years and I just aged like a gallon of milk??”

“Shut up, Nicky,” Allison Reynolds – and Neil is suddenly, violently reminded of the multiple times now his publicist has forced him to memorize the name of the designer he’s been dressed in, just in case someone asks. He can count at least five suits of her design that he owns, and at least two jackets. – laughs, and joins in on the hug. She’s less enthusiastic about it, lingering with shoulder touches and her chin hooked over Neil’s shoulder, but she stands just inside of the reach that would be appropriate for relative strangers.

Kevin looks paler than he should, and he steps away faster than he would otherwise; he bid an awkward, tearful farewell to his family to come out here, whereas the others have flown from across the country to find theirs.

And Neil—

Neil is staggering under the sheer amount of _everything_ that he’s suddenly remembering, suddenly _feeling_ , like he’s been sitting in a dark room for the last twenty years of his life and someone has suddenly turned on the lights. “We used to ditch math to go smoke under the bleachers,” he tells Allison’s elbow, looped around his neck, “and you used to sneak into my bedroom whenever you had a fight with your boyfriend.”

There’s a sharp crow of laughter from Nicky. “Get it, Neil!” that has all three of the others immediately groaning and reaching out to shove at his face.

“There’s a return flight out of Yeager leaving in like three hours,” Kevin leans over to whisper in an entirely normal volume against Neil’s ear, “just say the word and we’re on it.”

Allison shifts her grip from Neil’s neck to Kevin’s, with a brief stopover along the way as she squeezes his bicep and runs her nails along his chest. Kevin, with a grudging reluctance coming from their adolescence of much the same, allows it. “Speaking of,” and much like Nicky she’s grown almost to Kevin’s height as well. At fourteen he was the tallest of them by far, and then Matt caught up their sophomore year. “Are you gonna head over to your dad’s after this? I swung by this afternoon and he’s excited to see you.”

“You saw my dad?” Kevin’s voice is small and young, like they’re used to.

Her face falls when she realizes exactly how far their two decades of amnesia has gone. “Oh shit, Kev,” and now she does hug him, light and quick, “He’s great, he’s fine, he’s… I don’t actually know what’s going on but he doesn’t really seem to realize that he hasn’t talked to you in twenty years.”

The four of them fall silent, mulling over the words and the deeper implications; there is a buried thought that haunts their silence like it hasn’t their nightmares for years now, a gaping mouth with yellow eyes in the darkness that swallowed their memories when it failed to swallow their hearts. Now, here, together like this in the town where it all began, it’s almost as though there’s a presence hanging over their group, some weighted miasma of expectation that any second now everything will change.

Nicky breaks the silence, laughing nervously and shoving his hands into his pockets. “We should go inside,” he says quietly, eyes darting to the shadows of the parking lot. “The others might already be here.”

The concept of others is as strange as it is familiar, but there’s safety in numbers. Together, arms linked or shoulders bumping, they enter the restaurant.

* * *

The others, as it turns out, _are_ already there.

The bored, teenage waitress at the door doesn’t bow to any of them, but she does usher them into the private dining room at the back, the one reserved for parties that Neil, in his suddenly reclaimed memories, can’t recall ever actually being used. It’s definitely much too large for the five people who stand awkwardly spaced around it – the one closest to them is Danielle Wilds, the coach of the Atlanta Petrels and, as he’s recently remembered, the fourth member of his original friend group from back when they were all barely out of their toddler years. “If you don’t hug me right now,” she all but yells across the distance between them, barreling toward both him and Kevin like one of her players, “I will literally kill you.”

It’s not a hardship, hugging her. Somehow she feels as familiar to Neil as anything ever has, despite the numerous times they’ve been face to face over the years without ever once feeling anything close to the same. Kevin laughs and wraps his arms around the both of them, which Matt Boyd – Matt Boyd, who they met in middle school when his family moved from New York. Matt Boyd, who was never Neil’s best friend but was something closer to his brother. Matt Boyd, who is now, if Google is anything to go by, some big shot architect responsible for the design of the Whitney Museum’s newest wing. – takes as an invitation to join them. He’s already crying, which sets of Nicky, and before Neil can even process that he’s _here_ with these people he doesn’t know, but does, but knows he _loves_ , he’s completely enveloped.

“I’m not hugging you,” one of the twins – it’s been twenty years but Neil knows immediately that it’s Aaron, only because he doesn’t feel the same tug he would if it were Andrew, that compass tug toward north. – says blandly, but he shuffles over to do it anyway. There’s an awkwardness when he finds himself next to his cousin, one that probably shouldn’t be there except—

“Weird question,” Allison says like there’s anything _but_ weird at a time like this. “Did you guys all like, forget each other too? How did that work?”

The hug dissolves a little bit like their friendships had – suddenly, but reluctantly. Nicky shuffles his hands into his pockets again, then quickly tugs them out to run them through his hair, and finally twists them between the others, fiddling with a wedding ring on his hand. “No, uh, we get together every year for Christmas and shit. Hey Aaron.”

Aaron also hovers, bound in place with nervous energy, and fiddles in a similar fashion with a similar ring; they are obviously, painfully related. “Hey Nick. Umm, yeah, but then for some reason ever since college I’ve had all these… I don’t know, I was just so sure that we didn’t like each other?” Nicky and Aaron and Andrew had been a singular unit since they were born, Nicky only six weeks older than the twins and their parents sharing a house once it became clear that the twins’ father, still unknown to them, was not going to be in the picture. They’d been family, and friends, and the very idea that they somehow convinced each other that they hated each other feels wrong in Neil’s gut, more wrong than anything else.

It’s another few seconds of fiddling and twisting before Nicky opens his arms, and Aaron plows into him.

“Katie and Erik will be so proud we’re finally getting along,” Nicky jokes, and the mood lifts again into levity. Somehow, the joy of finding themselves together again outweighs the terror as to what’s brought them there, and it’s all too easy to fall back into the unshakeable bonds they had shared in their youth. They scoot the chairs around the large round table into various configurations to bring them closer, to allow elbows and fond memories to bump across the too small spaces between them, and they start in on the selection of beers that are spread across the table. If ever there was a time for drinking, it’s now.

It’s barely a minute or two before the IKEA paper screen rattles open, and the teenage waitress shuffles Renee and Andrew inside with a few rehearsed, ill-placed bows. She’s barely disappeared again before Renee looks at the group of people she’s called home, and she smiles. “Look who I found!” she says instead of saying hello, and shepherds Andrew toward the group with a hand in the small of his back. He looks smaller than he should, and goes easily – it’s unlike him. He looks like he’s swallowed something sour and then had the whole of his insides scooped out of him, and he drops into the nearest chair without saying a word. “He was in the parking lot,” Renee explains, and sits primly beside him.

He looks and sounds less like he was in the parking lot and more like he was trying to leave it. “Oh good,” his voice is fragile and dark, “we’re all here. Great.” He does, however, kick his foot out with unerring aim to catch Neil’s ankle, and then his eye when he glances over. His shoulders shrug in a short, practiced _guess this is happening_ that has Neil covering a smile behind another drink, and he nudges one across the table into Andrew’s hand.

They’re halfway through dinner and at least four rounds of drinks in – and Neil didn’t drink, or he did, but not _Before_. The Neil that hit the metro area bars with his teammates and celebrated victories with an easy, open laugh was the false one, the whatever the fuck fake life the last twenty years were built on, and that thought alone has him reaching for another shot without hesitation – when Matt sets down his beer, and opens his mouth. “I can’t—” He glances around the table at the people that he didn’t know an hour ago, but has known his entire life. “I can’t believe that I forgot all of this. All of you.”

“Literally witchcraft,” Andrew reminds them all from the slouch of his seat, looking slightly better than he had when they first sat down. Slightly less, at least, like he’d rather throw himself into traffic than remember.

The word sparks another round of drinks and another toast: to witchcraft! They laugh as their glasses clink together, much louder and sloppier than before, and hate just a little bit the way that the idea suddenly seems so normal. “Anyway,” Matt continues when they’ve calmed their laughter and their rattled nerves in alcohol, “I can’t believe I forgot you guys. You’re the best friends I’ve ever had and, with varying degrees of no homo, I love you.”

Nicky lunges to plant a wet, smacking kiss on his cheek to everyone’s delight, and Kevin glares down his beer bottle like it’s an opposing player during a championship game. “I can’t believe I forgot you all existed and _still_ somehow managed to get stuck with Neil.” Allison barks a sharp, ugly laugh that she doesn’t look surprised by – it’s the same laugh from their childhood, from the awkwardness of puberty, the laugh that meant she wasn’t trying to be beautiful and instead was just happy to _be_.

“Fuck you, Kev,” and it’s the habit of two lifetimes, a childhood they’ve just gotten back and the last decade or so they’ve carved out on the court. “I am the best thing that ever happened to you.”

His phone is already out, thumbs moving across the screen with vindictive intent. “I’m telling Thea you said that, so you better fucking hope this clown motherfucker kills you before she oh what the fuck, she agreed.”

Dan slams back her drink, and what remains of Kevin’s, like it’s water. “I can’t believe it’s been twenty-odd years and y’all are _still_ fucking annoying.”

Matt stares at Dan’s face like he’s memorizing the most magnificent sight of his life, or maybe just re-memorizing his favorite. Like she’s something unattainable and untouchable, despite the sudden lifetime of memories of having and holding and— “I can’t believe I forgot _you_ ,” he says, reverently, like he’s kneeling at an alter and not crowded around a table in an off-brand Chinese restaurant.

Andrew raises a glass as if in a toast. “I can’t believe I forgot I was gay.”

Just like that the spell is broken, and everyone laughs. There’s a few other drinks raised in mock salute, a few calls of agreement or otherwise joking disbelief that any of them could have forgotten anything, everything, _this_. And then, finally, they realize that Andrew isn’t laughing. Isn’t joking. “Oh shit,” Nicky sobers instantly, laying a hand on the table next to Andrew’s, almost close enough to touch. “You are?”

Renee doesn’t give him those few inches, wrapping his hand in hers without hesitation. “You never said anything,” she squeezes support and love across to him, and not a hint of accusation. “Not even before, we never – we never knew.”

“How do you just... _forget_ you’re gay??” Neil laughs, and runs the toes of his shoes along the laces of Andrew’s from across the table.

To the table’s surprise, Andrew laughs as well. “I know, right? I feel like I should have figured it out, given the obvious.”

Neil thinks for a second, and then grins. “Repressing your entire childhood?”

“Wanting to fuck dudes.”

There’s a few toasts to the sentiment from the girls, and from Nicky, and surprisingly from Matt; Aaron groans in disgust and throws a wonton across the table at his twin, who swats it away with a smug grin. He might be twenty years out of practice, but once upon a time he’d been the reason that Neil was as good a striker as he was.

It takes a few minutes for Nicky to process the thought that has clearly taken root, given the way he stares in contemplation for a good amount of time before he pounces. “You don’t seem surprised by this,” he points one finger in accusation at Neil.

Caught, he glances askance at Andrew in one of their unspoken conversations; a twist of his lips and a wrinkle of his chin and Andrew answers. “Yeah, that’s because Drew told me he was gay when we were like fifteen.”

Nicky clutches his chest and slumps in shock that, evidently, has nothing to do with the fact that Neil knew this piece of information long before anyone else. “You came out before I did??? But my entire identity has been built around being the gay cousin!”

“Sorry,” Andrew says, sounding anything but.

(Andrew actually came out the summer before his fourteenth birthday, just weeks after the whole thing with Riko. With Drake. He and Neil had been in the hammock of the clubhouse, a rickety sort of thing intended for only one, but one Kevin or Matt or Seth. Neil and Andrew were still small enough to squish both of their bodies together into it, though probably not for long – Neil was mostly leg at this point and Andrew was mostly shoulder, but with the right configuration of head to toe and with the right amount of comfort to prevent the distance between them, it worked. Andrew had his hand wrapped around the delicate bones of Neil’s ankle, which he’d twisted a few days before in try-outs for the track team.

“I’m gay,” he said without warning, and immediately the grip on Neil’s leg had tightened in panic.

Neil devolved into a series of shaking, sit-up like motions in an effort to turn his body to meet Andrew’s gaze, but between the way Andrew fought just as hard to avoid it and the hammock that rattled like it was going to come loose from the ceiling, he finally gave up. Instead, he used the foot that wasn’t being clenched into further bruising to tap Andrew on the chin. “Are you—”

“You seriously asking me if I’m sure??” Andrew’s words were strong but his voice was soft, and the fingers that had been digging frantic marks into Neil’s leg released in a soothing sweep of apology. There was a touch of mania in his reaction, something walking the razor sharp tightrope of panic, and Neil knew that whatever Andrew meant to say to him, it wasn’t this.

He tapped his foot against Andrew’s face again because he knew how much he hated it. “Fuck you, I was gonna ask if you were okay with it.” The wild goose chase of trying to get Andrew to look at him ended in a glare. “With telling me, I guess. You’re flipping out, Drew.”

Andrew hunched shoulders just this side of too broad for the narrow, rickety hammock. “Are _you_ okay with me telling you?” His arms crossed and his jaw set and that was the Andrew the rest of the world saw, the scrappy small boy who always looked to start fights so he would never be taken by surprise by one. In some small, perverse way, it was Neil’s favorite Andrew. “You’re the one laying here with a fa—”

“Don’t say that.”

Andrew glared, eyes gold and furious, fire to Neil’s ice. “Why not,” he snarled, a challenge in every sound of his voice, in every set of his body; there was no comfort in their shared hammock now, but a rigid and frosty gap between them. “It’s true.”

In the years they had been friends, since the first day of kindergarten when the teacher had sat them down at a shared table, side to side and shoulder to shoulder like they did so many things still today, their relationship had not grown into one of softness and support. Both of them were prickly, jagged, were rough strips of boys that, like Velcro, fit perfectly only with each other. “It’s not,” Neil glared back, but squirmed across the sudden space between them to curl his arm around Andrew’s knee. “That’s a word they use for something they think is wrong.”

The glared shuttered, lids drawn tight like a house barricading itself in, and the grip on his ankle tightened again. “I am, though.” The words didn’t sound like Andrew’s, nor the voice; they were flat and hard, droned out like a recitation, and it took a moment for Neil to realize who they _did_ sound like; like the fire and brimstone sermons of Luther Hemmick. Something primal burned in his gut like it hadn’t since that night in the sewers, something that sang like his blood in his veins and the pipe in his hands.

He finally twisted his body in a way where he could sit up, and he framed Andrew’s face with his hands. “You’re gay,” he repeated, and didn’t look away. “You’re not sick, or evil, or wrong.”

Andrew blinked and was himself again, jagged and prickly. “Whatever,” he shrugged Neil’s hands off his cheeks, but he didn’t shift away. “You gonna freak out about it now?”

He laughed suddenly, and reached out to cup the back of Andrew’s neck again. “Why? Because my best friend is gay?” Aside from the talk around town he mostly ignored and the lingering talk on the television about the AIDS crisis, there has never been much said about gay people where Neil could hear it. All he knew for sure is that, after everything they had gone through, he had seen what made people evil and love could never be it. “Drew… I stabbed a clown through the fucking head for you. I don’t think there’s anything that could freak me out at this point.”)

Allison grins her ugly, shark-like grin and taps her hand against the tabletop. “I feel like a few of you owe me money right now,” and, honestly, none of them can remember well enough to know if she’s lying or not. All they can remember is that this is the way it should be, all of them here together like this, and that whatever weight they’ve been carrying unknowingly for years now has suddenly been lifted, and they can suddenly breathe.

“You bet on my sexuality?” Andrew meets her stare over the lip of a shot glass, face stern and hard, but there’s a twinkle in his eye that gives him away. “I am shocked and offended – that you didn’t get in on this, Az. We could have split the winnings.”

His twin snorts a similar laugh into his own drink, and while the twenty years of distance might have tarnished whatever they used to have, there’s hints of it in the way he doesn’t even hesitate. “We shared a womb, and a room until we were eighteen. I wasn’t allowed to join bets where I already knew the answer,” and then he has the audacity to _wink_.

Andrew hurls back the same dumpling as before, face cracking into a craggy grin that looks like it’s almost forgotten how to form, as Nicky and Dan and Matt snort laughter into their empty cups. Every second that passes brings an increasing sense of familiarity, of rightness, despite everything – despite Palmetto, the small town in the corner of the world that time and its children forgot. Despite two decades of lives built on lies, or at least on scripted parts. It’ a strange feeling, the way Neil can feel the years of tension release from his spine, relaxing into their presence. Can see Kevin do the same, and even Nicky. Allison only taps her hand again against the table, impeccable nails clicking out a rhythm known only to her, and then she flips it palm up. “Pay up, bitches,” she crows in victory.

And then the bowl of fortune cookies in the middle of the table rattles as one cracks open into a scorpion, and it stabs her through the hand.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y E S the chapter count has gone from two to three and N O i do NOT want to talk about it
> 
> it just appears that i am INCAPABLE of writing less than 40k on any given subject and the massive word count of the second part seemed too intimidating for one chapter

Allison lets out a shrill, blood-curdling shriek as her hand spasms, fingers curling in helplessly toward the palm where the stinger digs deeper; a droplet of blood escapes, diluted to near pink with the venom it carries out with it, and the obsidian-black scorpion starts hissing like a tea kettle. That seems to awaken the others, as the entire bowl of cookies spills onto the table and one by one they begin snapping in half, revealing an army of spiders and scorpions and vipers that leap and strike at the others, fangs bared.

Chaos ensues. Half of the humans gathered around the table fling chairs in their haste to escape, noises of surprise and alarm ringing out a cacophony of sound that barely covers the persistent whistling hiss of the beasts, the slide of scales or the click-click-click of scorpion pincers, and the screams that rip from Allison’s throat. Dan leaps into action with a serving spoon, swatting the scorpion to parts unknown away from Allison’s hand, and clutches the rapidly necrotizing wound close to her. The droplets of pink turns into a slow and sludgy red, and the skin is purple where it is not black (it is also white, in all the places where bone and tendon are visible, the subway map of her hand laid bare). She reaches for a glass of water only to pour what appears to be vomit, sour with bile and old blood, onto the table with a retch of disgust. “What the _fuck_ ,” she snarls, eyes wide. “What the fuck, what the fu—”

“Oh _shit_ ,” Nicky cries, hurling himself into a corner as one of the spiders, growing larger and larger as it clatters through the plates on the table, scuttles toward him; its fangs are long and drip acid as it tippity-taps closer, hissing. A swarm of venomous, jet-black creatures explodes from the bowl in the table, all of them rushing forward and into the size of a small dog, and every one of them is screeching unholy noises, eyes highlighter yellow. He grabs his chair and starts lashing out with it, blindly, knocking two of the creatures away but also Neil into Matt.

Matt catches him, steadies him easily, only to pull him off-balance again as he tugs Neil out of the path of one of the snakes; the fangs graze his arm anyway, instantly bubbling with dead flesh and putrid, corrosive pus that starting eating away around the wound like the boil in Allison’s hand, quickly turning into a crater of sinew and bone. His hand spasms and the muscles in his arm dance in echo, the raw silver of ligaments and tendons flickering like fish in the panicked light of the room. “Oh my god,” he’s almost crying, and he pulls Neil against the wall of the dining room, an arm slung tight across his chest, “oh my god, oh my god.”

From the first appearance of the scorpion Andrew had hurled himself and his chair backward, clattering to the ground painfully; Aaron appeared at his side to help him up only to be pulled to the floor as well, bullied behind one of the plastic plants that hid whatever power outlets dared to ruin the restaurant’s theme. Andrew then reaches into his sleeves and, remembering that now, of course, there’s nothing to find, reaches for Renee instead.

In the ensuing chaos of the venomous monsters than pour from the table like spilled liquid, the light fixtures above them all shatter into shrapnel, raining down glass and sparks. The aquarium on the far wall shatters as well, releasing a torrent of blood where there should be saltwater. And then, finally, the music playing over the hidden ceiling speakers (a baffling alternation of traditional Chinese strings and early 2000s pop hits) cuts out into static, and then into a voice that even regaining memories had forgotten.

“Welcome home,” the thing they have only ever been able to call IT, because calling it by name – I’m Riko, he sneered at them in the ruins of the old house, mouth salivating, teeth growing, the Dancing Clown! – made it seem real somehow. “Are we all here?” he taunts over the crackling, tortured speakers, “or are we waiting for one more?”

It hits them then, in the calamity of life-or-death, that Seth hasn’t arrived yet.

“You know what?” Kevin finally yells, less forceful and more absolutely terrified; he’s pale and drawn, eyes wild, “Fuck you, and fuck this!” before he takes the closest chair and sends it hurtling through the cheap paper screens into the main dining hall.

Cheerful, happy patrons shriek in alarm as the chair knocks into the nearest table, and at least three of the wait staff come rushing over, along with the bored teenager who met them at the door; she doesn’t look bored now, but quietly furious. “What the hell, man?” she starts in before she’s even inside their room, focus locked entirely on Kevin. “You just threw a chair, and—” A small noise squeaks out of her like she’s been hit in the stomach when she finally sees the state of their dining room – every plate, bowl, and glass is broken, along with the fish tank and at least three chairs. There’s a pile of vomit on the tablecloth, and everyone is hyperventilating. There are also entirely unharmed. “What the hell did you guys do to this place? I’m calling the cops!” She motions for one of the other waiters to get the phone.

Aaron quickly, and slightly gleefully, shoves his brother to the floor and begins manhandling him roughly, motions overly large. “Are you calling 9-1-1?” He asks hopefully, and slaps at Andrew’s head to keep him quiet. “Oh, thank god. My brother, he just had a seizure!”

Nicky and Matt immediately begin nodding, looking somber. “It was terrible,” Matt agrees, “we thought he was gonna die.”

Sliding out from behind the plastic fern, Renee takes the hand closest to her and pats ineffectually at Andrew’s wrist. “There weren’t _peanuts_ in the sauce,” she asks calmly, not at all like a woman worried for her – no one is quite sure what part in this she’s playing. Just that, for ever word out of her mouth, the staff look more and more like they’re willing to forgive the damages, “were there? He’s terribly allergic, we told the waiter—”

The previously bored teenager goes from quietly furious to loudly horrified in an instant. “Oh my god!” she cries out and, heedless of the glass, drops to her knees beside the twins. “Oh my god, he’s gonna be okay, right? He’s not gonna like, _die_ in here, is he?” She’s hyperventilating now, or maybe crying, and Neil bites his knuckle to keep from laughing. “Call an ambulance!” She screams at the three equally frantic workers behind her.

“There’s no time! We need to get him to the hospital right now!” Aaron yells, and hauls Andrew (with some difficulty. Aaron was always exactly half an inch taller than his brother, but he was also never quite able to put on anything in the way of muscle mass, either.) to his feet, looping his arm across his shoulders and power-walking for the door. “It’s okay!” he calls back, “I’m a doctor!”

A few of the dining patrons applaud as their group makes a chaotic, hasty exit out the front doors, while both Allison and Neil hang behind just long enough to leave a handful of hundred dollar bills on the table as a tip. Or maybe a bribe.

In the parking lot, Andrew and Aaron are engaged in what was all too familiar a sight in their child: a hissing whisper of a fight, sharp voices at low volume, punctuated with similarly sharp gestures muted close to their body and the occasion swat to the other’s shoulder. “A fucking seizure?” Andrew snarls out of the corner of his mouth, words all but slung into one single, slurring amalgamation of a sentence, “what the fuck??”

“Well it fucking _worked_ ,” comes Aaron’s speedy, sibilant reply, “didn’t it?”

“‘It’s okay,’” Andrew parrots, raising his eyebrows and his voice in mockery; it’s not just the resurgence of a forgotten rivalry that has them like this, childish and petty. It’s the way they always were when they were scared, turning on each other when there was nowhere else to turn, fighting the only battle they knew they didn’t need to win to survive. It’s terror, pure and simple, the same way Neil can still feel his pulse pounding from the restaurant, hear it thundering in his ears, feel his lungs catch and shrink against his ribs. “‘I’m a doctor!’ You’re a _pediatrician_.”

There’s a normalcy to be found in their arguing, something as familiar as the childhood it was the backdrop of, that gives them all a moment to breath. To try and put themselves back together after whatever happened back there after dinner; Neil examines his arm, which is as unblemished as it had been that morning (which is still a patchwork of old scars, but at least ones he recognizes), although he can still feel the pain of the viper’s bite. He moves on to check Allison’s hand next, also perfectly healed, though it was all but rotted through only minutes before. Something about all of it feels very wrong, but not in the way he thinks it should. “And you’re the biggest fucking baby I know,” Aaron is continuing, oblivious to anyone who is not his brother, “so I guess it’s appropriate!”

A large presence appears at Neil’s back, leaning over his shoulder to investigate both his arm, and Allison’s hand; Matt had always been the overprotective one, since the day they first met him – older than the others, middle school rather than elementary. His mother’s second marriage brought them from New York to West Virginia, and a big presence from a big city wasn’t exactly welcomed by the kids of their small town. He’d been mostly friendless until he fell in with them, seamlessly fitting into a gap they hadn’t known they’d had, and he’d repaid their acceptance by becoming something of a bodyguard, or maybe an older brother. Or maybe it wasn’t that they were his friends that had him fretting after their every move for the next five years, but the fact that it was that summer they first spent together that they— “You’re okay,” he confirms, and squeezes both of their shoulders fondly. “ _Fuck_.”

Allison finally tugs her hand free of Neil’s grasp, gone white-knuckled tight as the adrenaline flees his body, leaving him feeling small and exhausted, and throws both arms around Matt’s neck. “Hi!” she smiles weakly, “I feel like we missed that part earlier.” He smiles the same weak, forced smile as he returns the embrace, but there’s genuine warmth and familiarity in the way his arms wrap unselfconsciously around her lower back and lift her to her tip-toes.

“Hey, Al,” he sets her down carefully, keeping them both close, and scans the parking lot for the others – none of them have gone far, all clumped into small groups inhabiting the same fifteen square feet of pavement, like now that they’ve finally got each other back they’re unable to split apart. He meets Dan’s gaze and beckons her over, the motion drawing Nicky and Kevin and Renee and even the twins as well. “Hey guys,” the smile is slightly stronger this time, the greeting more genuine out here in the dark, more sober than their one over dinner.

Kevin fiddles with the phone in his hand. “Where’s Seth?”

The same way their memories unlocked at Renee’s voice, the strange fog of not-quite-recalling what happened only minutes before – there is the restaurant, and there is fear. The rest of it all slides through their grasp like a liquid, but slowly thickens into something almost tangible. There were monsters, and there was Riko.

Neil remembers Riko, and then suddenly he remembers every single other thing that he hasn’t magically forgotten, but has legitimately repressed. “Oh fuck,” he moans, and bends over to try and keep the wave of lightheadedness from taking him out right there, “fucking piece of shit demon fucking clown, what the fuck.”

A hand resting lightly against his lower back proves to be Renee, not ignoring his panic but allowing him the moment to process it; she answers Kevin instead. “I talked to him the same day I did all of you,” she says quietly. “He… wasn’t happy to hear from me, but he said he understood.”

 _Understood_.

It’s a really nice way of saying that he suddenly remembered that everything he _did_ remember was a lie, and that when he was thirteen years old he spent his summer vacation bleeding and nearly dying in the sewers beneath his hometown because a literal demon murdered a bunch of people, and one of his best friends’ fathers murdered a bunch more, and that the ten of them cut their hands open and swore an oath to come back and do it all again someday before prompting forgetting the entire experience and moving on to some fucked up, monkey’s paw future – success, but sadness. Wide renown, but never belonging. Standing on the world’s stage, but built from a house of cards.

Having it all, but only getting to keep it if you continue to forget.

And then, without choosing, forced to remember.

None of them want to be here, not really – but none of them ever really considered not coming. And, as much as he’d always been the most reluctant of them, as many times as he’d sworn up and down that summer that he was out, that he was going home, that they were on their own, he’d been right there beside them from beginning to terrifying end. As much as it’s in Seth’s nature to complain about being with them, it’s not in his nature to stay away. “I’ll call him again,” she quickly pulls up her contacts and dials, smiling in a way that doesn’t reach her eyes. “I bet he’s just running late.”

They all agree, though none of them can shake the feeling in their gut that tells them he isn’t.

The phone rings and rings, and then it rings some more. Right when they expect it to go to voicemail, it instead connects to a weighted silence and then, finally, a heavy sounding “hello?”

The woman sounds like she’s drowning, voice wet and rough and tired. She’s obviously not Seth. “Mrs. Gordon?” Renee asks, tentatively; someday the moment will come when they have time to ask how it was that Renee remembered them all, was able to find them all scattered around the country like this. Instead, they crowd around the phone and listen to who is apparently Seth’s wife come slowly apart across the line. “My name is Renee, I’m a friend of Seth’s.” Another heavy sound, this time a swallow, and what sounds like a desperate exhalation. “Can I… Is he there?”

She doesn’t answer, not right away. Instead, she breathes into the phone like she’s only just learned how, and finally she sobs. “Seth’s gone,” she breaks down in the way that only happens when someone has pretended to be strong for too long now: unwillingly. She sobs her heart out to a series of strangers on her husband’s phone, and she tells them everything. “He’s gone, he left me he— He got a call about his childhood, about something that happened, and he told me he had to go, and he kissed the kids goodnight and he went upstairs to pack and he got in the shower and he—” Her words devolve entirely into tears and whimpers and unintelligible sounds of hurt, keening across the line.

“And he slit his wrists with a razor blade,” Neil finishes, words rough and jagged, like he’s been screaming. In some way, he thinks that maybe he has been for the last twenty-seven years, but now he’s finally able to hear it. “Before he wrote IT on the wall in his own blood.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath from somewhere to Neil’s left, and also to his right, and he hear Renee murmur a soft “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Gordon,” along with a few more scripted platitudes into the phone before she ends the call as quickly as politeness will allow her. And then it’s just the nine of them left in the dark, half-deserted parking lot, a rough circle drawn rougher by the empty space that’s meant to have been filled by their missing member. Allison is crying, and Matt and Nicky seem close on her heels; Neil is still bent in half at the waist, staring at the tarmac, and there’s another touch at his lower back, but he knows it’s not Renee this time by the way there’s nothing gentle about it.

“I saw him die,” he tells Andrew’s familiar weight as his back. “Hundreds of times, almost every night until we left.” The words come easier now, now that he remembers – after the phone call he remembered his friends and he remembered his past and he remembered his parents, but he didn’t remember this, the tar-thick taste of panic in the back of his throat, the way he used to go days without sleeping because every time he closed his eyes he was back there, in the no place at all, in the Deadlights. “I saw him die because we called him home, and I saw how each and every one of us dies after him if we don’t stop that fuck this time around.”

Andrew touches his back again in acknowledgement, but Matt grabs his shoulder and pulls him upright. “You sure about this?” He doesn’t ask because he doesn’t believe Neil, but because he _does_. They’ve all been through too much together for anything otherwise.

In the same part of his mind that only a week ago was a happy jangle of counting down the days to Thea’s due date and the days until he and Kevin left for Tokyo, the part of his brain that is always sure of things that are empirical facts, like numbers, Neil is sure of this: that if they try to leave or fail to act, the nightmares that plagued his teen years will certainly come to pass. The first of them already has. “Yeah, Matty,” the circle has closed, filling what should have been Seth’s space and any empty spaces left over, a press of bodies coming together into whatever safety they can find. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

* * *

Most of them head back to the hotel, or inn, or whatever passes for the equivalent in a town as small as Palmetto. They don’t usually get visitors here, mostly because there’s nothing to visit, so the few handful or so of outsiders they get usually stay with whatever family they’ve hauled out to visit. As such, there’s not exactly anything in the way of, well, anything – there’s just what everyone calls The Palmetto House, a Civil War-era mansion that was the mayor’s house until the 1904 election when the wealth disparity was apparently a big ticket platform, and has since then just been a catch-all of a nice building. Every high school class has had their prom there, and their graduation dinner, and they have all the major town events there (there’s a picture somewhere of Neil in the formal ballroom of The House as a toddler, celebrating Palmetto’s three hundredth anniversary. There are separate pictures of the rest of them, all at the same party, though most of them didn’t meet for another two years.)

When there’s no major event happening, however, The House stands empty and city-owned, and they’ve never quite established a policy on renting rooms out because it so rarely comes up, but they’d gladly rented a few bedrooms on one of the renovated floors (the lower half of the building is preserved and restored, relatively unchanged from the 1800s. The upper half was redone in the 1970s and not since.) to some of their returning residents. Neil and Kevin are the last to arrive, caught up with a bittersweet visit to Wymack at his home – he was pleased to see them, but didn’t seem to realize how long it had been that he hadn’t. There’s something of a stasis caught around the town, trapped in itself, that means Kevin’s dad had been fully caught up on his boys’ lives, but completely unaware that he had never been a part of them.

Kevin tosses his duffel onto the floor of one of the farthest rooms down the hallway; the group chat they’d only just made at dinner had informed him and Neil that they were the two rooms on either side of the bathroom by nature of a first come, first serve room selection. He looks old and tired, wiped clean of the vigor that has kept him a media darling for the last two decades, and he collapses stomach-down and fully clothed onto the bed. “Is it bad,” he asks Neil in an almost whisper, “that I almost wish I hadn’t answered Renee’s call?”

It is, and it isn’t; Neil almost wishes the same. “You mean you sort of wish you were still living that life where you didn’t remember anything before your eighteenth birthday and you had a totally different personality and then a curse you didn’t even know about killed you in a horrific accident like five years from now?”

The pillow from the bed slaps against his leg, but not very hard. Kevin is still holding onto it, and he reels it back to stuff beneath his cheek. “Yeah, actually.”

“Right there with you, Kev,” Neil answers in the same almost whisper, and pats Kevin’s ankle gently. “Sucks to be us, yeah?” There’s a muffled murmur of a reply, something he doesn’t stick around to hear, because it’s been a long day capped with an even longer evening that’s rocketed him back into a very long series of years his mind may have forgotten but his body never did, and he’s _exhausted_. It’s a long handful of steps from Kevin’s door to his, the bathroom a vast territory between them, and by the time he’s got the key out and the door open he doesn’t have the energy to turn on the light.

He’s not exactly surprised when the hallway light reveals another person already in his bed, but he’s a little bit surprised that it’s Allison. Then she curls beneath the quilt a little tighter, and a little bit of a sound escapes her, and he realizes that maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised about any of it – she always used to sneak into his room when she was crying about a boyfriend, or this time maybe an ex. Or maybe, he finally works up the courage to look the bruises ringing one wrist that had been too easy to ignore when he was more worried about her hand rotting off, also a current. “Move the fuck over,” he grumbles, but curls himself gently and easily around her.

She goes, shifting closer to the wall and wrapping her arms around his waist, and sniffling a little bit pathetically into his shirt. “Oh shit,” she pulls away like she’s been burned, “is this one of mine?”

He’s not sure it’s one of anyone’s; he packed in a bit of a haze, grabbing whatever fit into his bag, and dressed for the plane in whatever didn’t. “I actually think it’s from Target,” he admits, because he doesn’t know for sure but he knows it’s not from his closet where the designer clothes live.

“Okay then,” and she buries her face back into his chest before wiping makeup and snot across the front of it unapologetically. “Seth killed himself,” she repeats, like maybe she might believe it soon. Seth had always been part of their friend group even if he’d never been any of their best friends – that honor fell to his older brother, two years ahead of them in school and already set on such a pedestal that by the time any of them got around to finally meeting him they couldn’t help but worship him a little bit too. But he’d been one of them as long as they’d been a them to be part of, and while he might always have been a little bit sharper, a little bit meaner, he’d also been the first of them to take Renee’s hand and follow her into the sewers.

Seth killed himself. Last night and countless nights in Neil’s dreams, always the same way.

Seth killed himself and Neil _aches_ with how much he misses him, even though he’d already been gone before Neil remembered there was anybody to miss. “My thirteenth birthday,” he starts, and Allison is already snorting with the promise of laughter because she knows this story, they all know this story, “you remember? He didn’t really get the idea of a bar mitzvah, but he was so excited that I was apparently going to be an adult before the rest of you.” Somehow, in the explanation he never bothered to listen all the way through, Seth had gotten it in his head that Neil was literally, and legally, going to be considered an adult after the ceremony. “So he—”

Allison snorts again, and then she cackles, “ _god_ , none of us bothered to correct him, either. We just gave him our share of the money!”

To this day, Neil isn’t sure where a twelve-year-old Seth had managed to find a stripper willing to take the offered ninety dollars to come all the way out to Palmetto, only that he had. All he knows for sure is that _that_ disastrous afternoon had been the last time he’d ever set foot in a synagogue, but he thinks it has far more to do with what happened that summer than it did the shame his father had hurled on him as he’d tried to corral the by-then topless dancer out of the reception hall. “And the worst part,” he can feel his own lips tug upward into a smile, despite everything, “is that I couldn’t even be mad at him for it because he was the only one of you fuckers who bothered to show up!”

The crow of laughter they share is smothered against pillows and shirts and the awareness of the late hour; it’s after midnight, but not yet two. Somewhere in the two-hour window of definitely too late to be awake, but still too early to commit to the all-nighter. “I think he and I would have stayed together,” she admits into the calm that falls after they’ve bitten off the last of their humor. “You know, if we hadn’t all been forced apart the way we had.”

Allison and Seth had started dating when they were sixteen, just a week after she and Nicky broke up – by that point he had stopped denying himself and finally come out to all of them, and the off-and-on relationship he and Allison had carried on for the last ten months had ended with the same softness of friendship it had begun. They were together the rest of high school, up until the few months after graduation when they both left for college and— And that’s suddenly where Neil’s memories of them cut off, like a movie whose reel has been cut, picking up only the day before when Renee called.

“It wouldn’t have helped,” he tells her softly. Gently. “He was always going to end up here.”

By the time Allison has cried herself out against the front of his shirt, it’s well into the time of morning where sleeping would be a detriment rather than anything healthy; they both allow themselves to drift toward it anyway, only because staying awake means finally talking about the dark ring of skin on her arm or the pale one around her finger, and neither of them is quite ready for that yet. The intimacy that’s stayed sewn into the bonds between their group is that of a childhood together, and not nearly mature enough yet for the grown-up problems that particular can of worms promises to release.

A creak of the floorboards leads to a scratch of the door, and then it squeaks gently open as someone slips inside. It’s something so subtle, so muted, that they know it can’t be Riko coming for them; he thrives on the terror of the production of death, not the death itself. If there’s any one place in this world that they would be safe, it’s in the tranquility of a quiet night’s sleep. “Hey,” Allison squints her eyes against the light from the hallway. It’s obviously one of their friends, though the silhouette is too vague for much else, but Neil knows immediately that it’s Andrew because he was the only one of them who was ever halfway decent at picking locks. “You gonna join us?”

The click of the door closing behind him doesn’t do anything to cover his snort of derision. “Fuck no,” he snarls at the idea, but crawls over their legs to burrow into the full-size bed alongside them. They don’t fit, not comfortably, but it’s the ease of muscle memory to find an arrangement of limbs that allows them to make it work.

Closer to sleep now than ever before, Allison reaches out with one hand and swats at the air until she finds Andrew’s head, petting his hair absently. “You here for a platonic snuggle and a sympathetic shoulder to cry on?”

He swats out with his own hand, knocking hers away, but only to pull it down closer to his face so he can examine the marks under her sleeve; she doesn’t try to pull away, not like she had with Neil, but she tenses her grip like she wants to. When he finds whatever he’s looking for, maybe an answer, he strokes the bones of her wrist exactly once and then releases her. “No,” he finally answers her question, “not exactly.”

She snorts again. “Non-platonic snuggling?”

“Unsympathetic shoulder,” Neil offers.

Andrew doesn’t answer like he’s still deciding whether or not he’s going to acknowledge that he’s even heard them; instead, huffs an annoyed sounding noise and reaches a hand out. When he snaps his fingers a few times into the hollow between the three of them, Neil shifts just enough to pass over a pillow. It’s a few moments for him to get himself comfortable, squishing the pillow into the space between his shoulders, Allison’s thighs, and the wall. “I actually came in here to tell you about the batshit crazy ritual Renee says we need to do,” he says casually, and calmly. “But I guess now I’m here to try and get some fucking sleep.”

Neil groans and tugs the quilt, and Allison’s arm, over his eyes. “Drew, you can’t just drop a fucking _ritual_ on me and expect me to just go to sleep.”

“Don’t be a little bitch, Neil,” Allison snorts into his collarbone. “Go to sleep or go to another room.”

“Mine is across the hall,” Andrew mutters, and there’s a shifting from the foot of the bed before a brass key jingles somewhere into the vicinity of Neil’s elbow. “Don’t touch my shit.”

He takes the key, but he doesn’t leave; it’s nothing they haven’t done before, sleepovers in middle school and high school ending in the ten of them sprawling into whatever arrangements across the two couches in Wymack’s living room and the air mattress he always set up on the floor. The whole sleeping in the face of impending death part is tragically familiar as well. “Rituals are a breakfast conversation,” he groans again, and makes himself as comfortable as he can. “How fucked are we?”

A pause, and then the thunk of shoes hitting the floor. “I’ll buy your waffles,” Andrew offers.

“Oh good,” Neil agrees, and allows himself to start falling asleep. “We’re fucked.”

* * *

The next morning they go for breakfast at the same diner that they always used to go to, every weekend and sometimes after school. In some ways, Neil thinks he spent more of his adolescence in one of those booths then he did his own home – they were _always_ there, when they weren’t in school (or in trouble). It helped, a little bit, that it was owned and run by Renee’s aunt and they always got extra servings at a discounted price, but mostly it was just that there was only the one diner within the town limits and, at ten and twelve and fourteen, they hadn’t been able to drive anywhere else. Back then it had been called simply Walker’s, but they find when they walk up that at some point in the last twenty-odd years, it’s been renamed to—

“Robin’s,” Dan says quietly. Reverently. The booths and the doors were red in their memories but are a bright cobalt blue now. Robin’s favorite color had been blue.

Renee meets them outside with gentle hugs and a bittersweet smile before leading them to the large corner booth in the back; he doesn’t care to look, not now, but Neil bets if he did he would still see their initials carved into the bottom from when they had claimed it as their own back in the fourth grade. “She did it back in 2003,” Renee gestures to the changed décor, and the name. “You know, for the anniversary and everything.”

They all nod solemnly, and Andrew reaches out beneath the table to take Renee’s hand in his own; the loss is a grief she was never given the luxury of forgetting, not like the rest of them were. “She loved this place,” Kevin tells her gently. Kindly. There’s so much more softness to him now that he’s a father, and Amalia is only a little bit younger than Robin had been when she’d—

Well.

She’d gone missing, and she’d been found dead. The official story never needed to know any more than that.

Breakfast starts out subdued, only because they’re suddenly all remembering Robin – and the summer they lost her, the summer this all began (for them, at least. It apparently began for the town of Palmetto some hundred or more years before, which was something they were still trying to wrap their brains around. Matt had told them as much back in school, showed them the evidence from back during the Civil War even, but there was something caught between knowing and _understanding_ that whatever they were currently facing was so far beyond their existence entirely). But it picks up like dinner had the night before, loud and boisterous, high on the feeling of finding each other again.

True to his promise, Andrew pays for Neil’s waffles. And Allison’s, when she grins at him. “Wow,” she croons gently, and steals a bite of muffin from Matt’s plate. “A famous author is buying me breakfast, I feel so important.”

He throws a wadded up napkin at her, a smile tugging reluctantly at the corners of his mouth; Neil can see it sometimes, in the way Nicky and Aaron look at him – a mixture of longing and relieved – that whoever he became in these last twenty years, he became alone. They look at him like they haven’t seen him smile at someone in their adult memories, and relieved that they’re seeing it again like they did in those of their childhood. Sometimes, like now when he quirks one corner of his lip up and gleefully throws his makeshift weapon at Allison, it almost seems like Andrew feels the same. “Tim Gunn personally flew out to host the weekend pop-up event when you launched into casual wear, but yeah. I’m sure _this_ is the moment that makes you feel special.”

If anyone is surprised that Andrew knows details of their professional lives, they don’t show it; it had made sense, when he told them that he only got into writing novels full-time when he was benched from his detective job following an injury. “Well,” she says instead, but preens a little bit at the acknowledgement of her achievements, “I don’t have an Oscar-nominated actor playing my lead character in my hit Netflix series, but I do alright.”

This time the noise of disgust comes from Nicky, seated to her left, and he shoves at her side until she’s leaning over into Dan and full-out laughing. “You dressed him for the Oscars, shut the fuck up!”

Dan, linking her elbow through Allison’s to pull her close exactly in the opposite move as shouldering her away, giggles. “Maybe that’s why he lost,” she says to Allison’s affronted gasp and the table’s collective snort of laughter.

Examining her nails, and holding her hand out for the return of the napkin she’d already thrown back at Andrew – but hit Aaron instead, claiming she just couldn’t tell them apart. It didn’t matter that they were seated four seats apart and that she always could. – to throw at Dan instead. “Suck my spiritual dick, Dani. I’m the most successful person here.”

“Not to be that guy,” Kevin starts primly, and it’s only the politeness that has them groaning that whatever guy he is assuring not to be, he’s about to anyway, “but I have six gold medals.”

Neil looks over to make mocking eye contact with Andrew and, seeing him distracted with rolling his eyes and making mocking eye contact with Aaron, turns to Matt instead. Like the teenage boys they used to be, Matt mimes a crude jacking off gesture at the back of Kevin’s head and pulls a face of disgust. “It’s a team sport, Kev,” he shoots a grin at Matt before schooling his face into something slightly more serious. “ _America_ has six gold medals.”

The look of confusion on Kevin’s face quickly morphs into one of rage, and a little bit embarrassment, when he recognizes the words as his own; it was an article right after their last games, and maybe he’d never meant it to be anything but a soundbite to get their publicist off his ass for the next few weeks, but the internet had remixed into at least seventeen different videos.

That’s where Renee’s aunt, and adopted mother, Stephanie finds them twenty-five minutes later; screaming at each other in their crowded diner booth over which of them grew up to be a bigger asshole.

* * *

After breakfast, which almost turns into lunch, and after Renee explains the ritual to them, which almost turns into another mass exodus from town – Allison, Aaron, and Kevin get as far as “IT came from space” before they start making their excuses and gathering their things, furtively retreating upstairs at the Palmetto House under pretenses of quick showers or a change of socks only to return minutes later with bags packed and keys ready. Their departure is only halted by the fact that Aaron and Kevin can’t leave without their respective family members in tow, and Allison refuses to be the only coward. Nicky, Matt, and Dan last just a little bit longer, right through the mention of the necessary sacrifice, before they also start cycling through various excuses and exit strategies. Again, their leaving is thwarted by those who refuse to; Andrew, possibly from loyalty to Renee, and Neil, probably due to the bruising grip Andrew keeps on his wrist like a shackle. – they sit in the heavy silence of the downstairs lounge and marinate in the possibilities for a good twenty minutes.

“So,” Matt is the first to break the silence, and was the last to fall to skepticism. It was the same way when they were kids, when all of this first happened, when kids were going missing left and right and he was the only one of them to think there was a _reason_ for it. Maybe it was because he was the only one of them to not have the curse of Palmetto born and bred into his bones that allows him just enough distance to look at the town and realize that its idea of normal was anything but. “We have to find our… tokens? Which are… what? Exactly?”

Renee smiles at him, sadly. “I don’t know. They’re personal, different for everybody.” She’d explained the ritual twice already, shown them the leather vessel with its ancient carvings, and though she’d nearly lost them all the first time round they actually seemed to listen for the second. The only part that seemed a hang up now, now that they’d chosen to believe, were the nebulous tokens at the very heart of it. “Something you sacrifice willingly, in exchange for,” and she rustles the vessel again, miming the demon trapped inside. “But it has to be something personal, a touchstone of the summer we survived.”

She holds out a fist and, opening it, reveals the silver cross on the delicate chain that started it all for them.

There’s a catch of breath in recognition, from all of them, and then they understand. The necklace had been Renee’s, was still Renee’s, but had been just the sort of treasure that an at the time six-year-old Robin had been absolutely fascinated with. She’d never exactly _stolen_ it, not truly, but she’d borrowed it from the small dish on Renee’s dresser whenever she’d removed it, wrapped it tight around her small wrist or let it slide like liquid through tiny fingers or just stroked the gentle filigree lines of the cross over and over and over again. She’d loved it, and Renee had hated sharing it, and one day had found Robin wearing it too-large around her neck in the tree in the front yard and—

And she’d yelled, and snatched it back, and Robin had run from the yard to keep from getting in trouble, and—

And she’d never come home.

“Selfishly choosing this is what started it,” she tells them, gazing wistfully at the burnished silver in her palm. She never wore it again, after that summer. It lived in the dish on her dresser until they graduated from high school. “And freely giving it up is what ends it. Go find your tokens, and we’ll meet back at the House at five.”

Dan acknowledges Renee’s sacrifice, and her grief of twenty-seven years, by lacing the fingers of their free hands together and squeezing tightly. “Something personal, something from that summer…” They’re forty years old and slung across the fallen logs like cats, every single one of them somehow in physical contact with at least two others; now that they’ve remembered their friendship, now that they’ve remembered the blood and battles that they survived together, they seem reluctant to give it up for even a second. And, they remember, they were exactly the same way as kids. “We were together literally the entire summer, can’t we figure this out together too?”

“But we weren’t.” It’s Allison, not Renee, who finally acknowledges the memories they’ve regained, but haven’t yet reviewed. “Not the _whole_ summer, I mean.”

It was right in the middle of the whole thing, when the terror and the trauma got to be too much for them. They’d gone into it for Renee, for closure, and then they’d gone into the house and had barely come out and—

Renee’s thin smile thins further. “The only reason we survived is because we came together, after everything.”

(After they had almost died, there in the ruins of an abandoned kitchen, Kevin cradling a compound fracture to his chest. After Dan had been the one to turn on Renee in the street, eyes and stance flinty and cold. _Robin is **dead**_ , she had yelled, there in the low light of the afternoon. _And if you don’t accept that we’re all going to join her!_ It didn’t matter than she and Allison and Renee had been inseparable since they were eight, their group since even before that; just as there was always a separate strength of the bonds between the twins and their cousin, there was always something just a little bit special between the original four who founded their friendship in kindergarten.

Renee hadn’t argued. Instead, she had reeled her arm back and punched Dan square in the face, just like Andrew had taught her.

The following fight split them all at the seams – they couldn’t fight Riko and they couldn’t fight death, but they could fight each other like the children they were. Renee and Matt and Allison and Seth had all stormed off alone, licking their wounds and cutting their losses. Aaron and Nicky had slunk home, oddly silent on the matter, but they’d had a lot to say once they got there; apparently it hadn’t been in agreement, and it hadn’t been kind. Kevin had gone to the hospital, and Andrew and Neil had done what they always did back then, when nothing else made sense – they went out into the forest, down into the clubhouse, and they stayed in the hammock until darkness had fallen. And then they went home.

In the following two weeks, aside from the few who shared a household, no one spoke. They barely even saw each other. It was frigid and frosty in a way it shouldn’t be, not for the heart of summer, and it didn’t break until—

Well, until Neil did.

He doesn’t remember Riko taking him, doesn’t remember where or even how it happened, but he remembers waking up in the dark of the underground caverns and thinking that this was going to be where he died. He remembers how strongly he felt that none of the others would come for him, and most of all the down to the bones _love_ that they all did.

He also remembers the torture, though he tries not to.)

“We have to do it again,” Renee continues, and stuffs the necklace back into the pocket of her jeans. “We have to face our fears, we have to be strong, and we have to come together to fight IT.”

* * *

They’re supposed to figure out their tokens alone; _literally_ , alone.

Instead, as soon as they’re out of earshot of the clearing, Nicky cracks a wild, hysterical sounding laugh against the silence and loops an arm around Aaron’s shoulders. “So, we all agree that this ‘let’s split up, gang!’ idea is stupid, right?”

Tension visibly bleeds out of each and every one of them. When Renee had told them what the ritual entailed, after she’d gotten them to believe it, there had been an overwhelming aura of disbelief; facing their fears certainly made since, if Riko fed on it, but the idea that tokens were something that must be actualized on their own just felt… dangerous. Needlessly so. Like maybe this wasn’t a horror movie, but it felt a little bit like one, and it was always when someone went off alone that they never came back. “Oh thank god,” Matt presses a hand against his chest, like he’s trying to calm his own heartbeat. “I was worried we were actually going to go for that.”

Surprisingly, it’s Dan who looks skeptical this time. Twenty-seven years ago, on a day very much like today, it was her who lashed out against Renee’s plan. Now, she chews her lips and glances thoughtfully back toward the clearing, and she hesitates. “I’m not saying going off alone sounds awesome in any way,” she starts, and stops, and starts again, “but I trust Renee, and I trust her research. What if this whole thing fails because we didn’t listen?”

It’s an entirely valid concern. They mull it over in bouts of silence for a moment or two, and then Kevin crosses his arms in the way he always does on the court, right before he issues a play. “Right,” his voice is full team captain, but Neil can tell he’s terrified by the way he tucks his left wrist, the one that had been broken, into his armpit for safety. “We split up into two groups, four people each. When you figure your token shit out, go get it by yourself. Your group will be right outside, they’ll come in after you if you take longer than three minutes.”

Neil grins, maybe. Or grimaces. “A lot can happen in three minutes.”

He doesn’t smile in return – he remembers. The first time, that first summer, they were down in the sewers for just about that long, and they nearly didn’t make it out. “Ninety seconds.”

Dan squares off against him, a similar stance; it’s so easy to see it now, how vast the history between them is, in the way so many of their quirks and characteristics are communal property. They reflect each other in the way only family and very long friends can, and Neil thinks that maybe if the world spent just a little bit less time analyzing every time he and Kevin breathed in the same zip code as each other they probably would have noticed this, and maybe they would have all found each other a whole lot sooner. “So are we drawing straws here? Picking captains and taking turns, like back in high school?” It shouldn’t come as a surprise, remembering that she and Kevin were _always_ chosen to be team captains, and they always fought over picking Neil.

What is a surprise is the way Aaron steps between them, hand in his pocket like maybe he’s looking for a coin to flip, but instead he just waves an elbow vaguely toward his brother. “Whoever is heading downtown is one group, whoever isn’t is the other. Let’s do this geographically so it takes the least amount of time.”

“That’s—” Both Kevin and Dan look like they want to disagree, but then share a glance and an entire conversation with their eyes where they realize by disagreeing with Aaron, they’re agreeing with each other. Both of them back off fairly quickly after that, Kevin shrugging his way back to Neil’s side and Dan twisting her lips into a rueful grin. “That’s actually a pretty great idea,” she tells Aaron, mostly sincerely.

Kevin snorts, unable to _not_ just be a good team player for the first time in his life. “Except how the fuck are we supposed to know where we’re going? I mean, we don’t even know what we’re supposed to be looking for, let alone _where_.”

“School gym.”

It’s an overlap of sound, the way they all speak in unison, and in the quiet that follows there’s a few shaky laughs and more than a few shared grins. Kevin looks completely infuriated that they’ve all somehow just known what he was meant to figure out, but nods his head in grudging agreement before refusing to make eye contact with any of them. “Shut up,” Neil tells him firmly. “You literally spent the entire two weeks of the fight there, so whatever the fuck fear you need to face, whatever token you need to find, it’s gonna be there.”

“Yeah,” Dan admits. Reluctantly. “Yeah, me too.” When she and Kevin share another of their grimacing unspoken arguments that they’ve been having since they were barely older than toddlers, she elaborates. “School, I mean. Not the gym. I spent a lot of that time at school, because I knew it was the one place in town none of you would be at.”

There’s a few minutes of quiet discussions between the others, a few minutes more of even quieter retreats into memories lost for over twenty years, but they eventually get themselves sorted into two teams of relative geographic location. Dan and Kevin are joined by Nicky, who spent most of the time apart at his job at the movie theater downtown – he had been the first of them to get a real job by nature of being one of the oldest, and the manager had been willing to overlook the fact that Nicky wouldn’t be fourteen for another month or so when he allowed him to pick up afternoon matinees – and Neil, who spent most of that strange period between the house and the sewers hiding in his bedroom from his father’s increasingly erratic behavior. The other four – Allison, Matt, and the twins – had spent the majority of those two weeks, if not that summer, if not their whole damn lives, trying to leave Palmetto behind, and are apparently keeping as far from the downtown proper as they can.

As easily as they’d arranged themselves into teams, as quickly as they’d scoured their memories for hints of the treasure maps they all need to follow, they’re reluctant to part. Four is a hell of a lot safer than one, but it’s only half as safe as eight (or nine. Renee is somewhere, probably back at her apartment at the library if she’s not already at the House waiting for them to get back), and there has been far too much parting in their friendships for them to want to try for another. But, eventually, they do.

Matt, who apparently knows immediately what his token is meant to be, leads his group back down the main trail to the road, and loads them all into the rented SUV he’d picked up at the airport. It’s only when he turns east, instead of south, at the fork that they get some idea of where he’s headed – there’s really only one thing east of town, and that’s leaving. “Please tell me this was all some elaborate plan of yours to just get us out of here,” Allison half-jokes from the passenger seat, but then the bridge comes into view and instead of crossing it, Matt slows the car and pulls into the stretch of dirt at the shoulder.

The bridge across the Potomac is a two-lane, otherwise unmarked turn-off from Route 340 that is the only way in or out of town, and has been standing at the broadest curve of the river in all its stark steel glory since 1931. The second bridge, which most residents refer to by the name The Bridge (the actual bridge is called The Road), is the remnants of the original B&O Railroad Crossing from the 1820s, stands only a hundred yards or so upriver. What used to be a covered wooden span of the entire river crossing has, through years and weather and general neglect since the railroad was diverted to a more practical course after the second world war, rotted away to maybe fifty feet of historical landmark, the far side boarded shut to avoid accidents. It’s where most teenagers went to make out, or fuck, when they were in high school, and it’s where the kids go to smoke weed, and probably fuck, now.

It’s also, and has been for as long as any town records can recall, covered in the carvings of various names and initials. The legend – they refuse to call it a history because there’s no evidence to prove it – says that it started back in the Civil War, when Palmetto was the only rail crossing of the Potomac. Soldiers passing along the bridge would carve their sweethearts’ name, or their initials together, or some other reminder of what they were marching away from, for luck. The legend says that lovers whose names were carved together on the bridge would stay together as long as the bridge, or what remained of it, still stood.

Matt pulls the car over, and Andrew immediately snorts in recognition. “Oh fuck,” he almost laughs, if he had grown into someone who remembered how, “The Bridge? You spent two weeks pining away at The Bridge?”

“I only spent _one_ _afternoon_ pining away at The Bridge,” Matt snarls in defense, and then realizes that isn’t any better. “But that… that was the afternoon Riko attacked me.”

They don’t talk on the short hike to The Bridge, which seems far shorter than it used to; The Bridge always seemed like some secluded place outside of the existence of the town, some secret in the forest passed down the generations of children through furtive word of mouth. A hidden place, forgotten from time. Instead, with the clarity of age, the structure seems older and worn and as close to collapse as they’ve ever imagined, not nearly as dark and vast as their memories, and despite the scrub brush and snarled branches they have to kick through, barely removed from the road. They can’t see the beginnings of the bridge out of town but they can still see their car where it waits nearby, and despite the far end being covered in layer of plywood and nails, there’s a series of holes in the roof that allow the space within to be nearly as well-lit as any modern room might be.

The light also, for what it’s worth, allows them to finally see the scope of the carvings that are dug at least two layers deep across nearly every surface of wood within.

“Matthew,” Andrew starts again, but this time there’s more than just a hint of laughter to his voice. The more than hint is mirrored in the immediate reaction of Aaron’s, who somehow just _knows_ what his twin is thinking, like he always used to – it drove them _crazy_ sometimes, the way the two could spend a whole evening stone cold silent but still have an entire conversation separate from that of their friends. Drove them even crazier with Neil in the mix. “Did you vandalize your names into The Bridge because Dan didn’t talk to you for a few days?”

He glowers, but doesn’t immediately deny it. Even Allison snorts a muffled giggle into her fist, but quickly turns away to not catch his gaze; her eyes scan the generations of carvings like she’s looking for one in particular, though. “I didn’t,” he says to their increased laughter. “I didn’t, I swear!” For all that he’s now the largest of them there’s something terribly fragile about the way he stands there in the patches of sunlight that mottle the floorboards. “I think I was _going_ to, that’s why I came out here, but then I… didn’t.”

“Because a clown attacked you.” Allison nods.

Aaron grins. “Because you were scared of defacing state property.”

“Because it felt wrong,” he admits softly. “Like, look, I know the legend is stupid. I know that this is just an old bridge and that these carvings don’t _actually_ bind people together forever or anything, but after what we had just seen? I don’t know, maybe all magic is real and I was gonna trap this girl I had only know for like a year and she didn’t even _like_ me—” It, like everything else about Matt, is terribly and tragically kind. “Anyway, I came down here to, I don’t know, carve my name and her name in little hearts or whatever—”

“As one does,” Aaron tries to sound supportive, but fails.

Andrew is only slightly more successful. “We’ve all been there. Probably.”

“And then I just couldn’t do it, so I sat here and I,” he glances at Andrew, smiling smugly, and sighs in defeat, “ _pined_ for awhile, and then… Well, you can imagine what happened then.”

They can imagine, but they can’t know for sure. The only time Riko ever took the same form for them was when they fought him together, when he was a clown. Otherwise his appearance and his actions would shift like liquid between the ten of them, taking the form and function of whatever would terrify them most. It didn’t matter that they were already terrified, oh no. He came up with new and creative ways to torment them each and every time, and he did it with a smile on his painted face.

“So,” Allison’s laughter is gone now, lost to the memories or imaginings of every single ‘what happened next’ they’ve survived until now. “What are we here to find?”

Matt stands small and soft, scuffing his feet into the floorboards while both hands plunder deeper into his pockets. “Nothing,” he mutters, and refuses to look at them. “We’re not here to find anything, I already have my token, we’re—” He looks at Aaron when he speaks next, but as soon as the words are free of his mouth they all know he’s meant them for Andrew and Allison. Aaron might be brash and he might be a jerk, but he’s not on the same level of things as the others are; his unkindnesses are all honest, at least. “We’re out here so I can tell you guys that if you ever talk about this again, I’m gonna throw you over The Bridge.”

And then he pulls out his wallet and, reluctantly, pulls a folded piece of paper from the sleeve behind his cash.

He toys with it momentarily, running fingers along the familiar folds and edges, and then finally opens it up – they recognize the title page of their yearbook almost instantly. No one says anything, though they clearly want to, and Aaron takes a step closer to Andrew like he’s preparing to intervene. “I know I knew you guys,” Matt is continuing, hardly explaining himself, “but we weren’t really, like, super tight until that summer. And then, well—” He flips the page over to show them.

There’s a loopy message written in the glittery pens that had been so popular back then, a silvery pink sort of color, in handwriting that is familiar in the same way the town is – only in memory. They’ve seen it most of their lives, on notes and messages, as well as shared school projects and assignments. _I’m so glad I met you,_ reads Dan’s flowing teenage hand, _xoxoxo D_. And then, right underneath, her old phone number and a few more x’s surrounding the ordered _Call me!!!_ that leaves no hints as to whether she meant it or not.

Andrew looks like he wants to say something, but Aaron beats him to it. “You kept that in your wallet this whole time? And you didn’t even remember who it was from??” They take in the fraying, worn out folds and the evidence that this note has been folded and unfolded multiple times over the last twenty-two years, and then he grins. “Not going to lie to you, dude, that’s super fucking— Shit, Drew, I can’t say it. You gotta say it.”

It’s a blink between them before Andrew grins in understanding, a sly sort of smile that never meant anything good back when they were all younger. “Gladly. Matt, that is so fucking gay.”

Matt throws both of them a middle finger, but it’s Allison who really focuses on the matter at hand. “Did you ever try calling the phone number? Or looking up the school the yearbook was from? Like really, Matt, you’ve looked at this _how_ many times and you never once tried to figure out where it came from?”

“Fuck you,” he says sheepishly. Half-heartedly. “There was clown magic involved.”

With a roll of his eyes and a disgusted groan, Andrew turns back for the car. “That excuse isn’t going to work forever, you know,” he snarls the reminder over his shoulder, and Aaron recognizes the brother he’s knows for the last two decades: the one that was broken, all sharp edges and a blaring _do not approach_ sign. The one that’s been largely absent since they’ve come back home, except when IT is mentioned. “Let’s go get the next token.”

* * *

Allison drags them just into town, to the park that sits along the southeast – it’s not the town’s main park, that one is right in the center of the downtown, surrounded by historical buildings and small boutiques and crowned in the center with a small stage and a statue of Thomas Jefferson. This second park used to be somehow involved with the high school before it was torn down, the town’s small population reaching a point where the entire student body could fit in a single K-12 facility, and had been nothing more than a casually maintained recreational field with some freestanding restrooms since the early 70s. Generally, it was where older kids gathered with their friends for events (the senior picnic was always there, or most teenage Fourth of July parties), or where people went to exercise their dogs.

“I know we’re not supposed to split up,” she turns around in the passenger seat to tell them, “but like, can you guys stay in the car? I sort of want to be alone.”

Her voice is soft but her lips are pressed, hard and thin, and they all immediately know that whatever memory she’s come out here to retrieve, it also belongs to Seth.

Andrew reaches out to take her wrist the same way he had the night before, turning it over to examine the bruises that ring it and the blue veins visible beneath her porcelain skin; whatever he’s looking for, some question or answer or explanation, he releases her just as firmly. “Okay,” is his only answer, but there’s always been an entire language to his monosyllabic responses. Allison smiles at him, a fragile little thing, and let’s Matt draw her across the gear shift into a one-armed hug.

“We’ll be right here,” he reminds her. “Just fifty feet away.”

“Actually,” Aaron begins, and ends just as quickly. He glances at his twin, elbowing him gently to catch his gaze, and then back down at his hands. “Actually, _can_ we split up? You stay here with Allison, and we—” He gestures between the two of them, Andrew shrugging his agreement despite neither of them having discussed what exactly there is to agree to, “I think we need to do this just as us. Like a twin thing, or whatever.”

Matt looks concerned, brow furrowed and lips bitten, but he also looks like he understands – and also, a little bit, like he knows he only needs to worry about Allison. The twins are, and have been, more than capable at looking after each other. “Do you want us to come pick you up after this?” He doesn’t ask where they’re going, like maybe he doesn’t need to, and Aaron nods gratefully. “Alright, you have,” a brief conference with Allison, “twenty minutes?”

“Thanks,” Aaron mutters gratefully, and elbows Andrew out of the car.

It’s not the shortest walk to their destination, but it’s not the longest either; there’s never been enough town for anything to be exactly far away from anything else, but there’s really only two parts of Palmetto to go to from the park – Main Street, and most of the town proper, is north. The older, crumbling, forgotten bits of it are east, and there’s only one of those places Aaron could possibly go to for a token. “I’m assuming,” Andrew finally speaks, still grumbly and sharp in the way he sometimes was a child, and always has been as an adult, “that you think you’re protecting me with this.”

The houses along this back road are abandoned, and in various stages of falling down; none of them are the house that IT lives under, instead they’re a far more human sort of ruined, signs of a failing town. They weren’t like this when they were kids, but they were like this by the time they were teenagers, and sometimes Aaron wonders how much of Palmetto’s slow death is their fault. Like maybe Riko’s presence was a cancer, but their halfway defeat of him was too much for a sick town to handle. The junkyard is at the end of this road, right off the turn where it slowly loops back into the main part of town. “I mean, that _was_ sort of my thinking, yeah.”

Andrew snorts. “Well, it’s pointless. I’m fairly certain everyone knows about the crash already, and it’s not like they would care if they found out.”

It takes a moment for Aaron to realize they’re having two different conversations. “Andrew, we’re not going to get _my_ token right now. We’re going to get yours.”

He stops, right in the middle of the road, and drags Aaron to a staggering stop alongside him. “Explain.”

There’s nothing jagged or sharp about him now. He’s slightly confused, pliable in the way he used to be – Andrew was never easy, not even as a child, but there used to be even the idea of give and take to interacting with him. Now he’s all barters and deals, and it’s difficult for Aaron to switch between the two lifetimes they’ve shared. “Drew.” It’s an entire conversation, just in the address. They’ve haven’t been on nickname terms since the nineties, have barely been on speaking terms even, but here in the liminal space of a forgotten childhood in a slowly fading town, it’s like there was never a time between. “Do you _really_ want to discuss your 1993 touchstone with the class?”

There’s a war between past and present playing out across his face, but finally Andrew laughs. “Fuck you,” there’s no actual venom behind it, not like there would have been even a week ago. If anything, there might even be something as close to warmth as Andrew can manage. “Besides, I already got it.” He reaches into the pocket of his jacket, and hands Aaron a familiar, fist-sized river rock. “It was back at the clubhouse, I grabbed it before we left.”

If Aaron suddenly finds himself feeling startlingly, suspiciously wet around the eyes, he blames it entirely on the fact that they’re probably going to be killed at some point in the next twenty-four hours. “What the fuck,” he tells the rock, and maybe a little bit his twin. “What the _fuck_ , Drew. I’m your something important?”

The rock disappears from his hands and back into the fathoms of Andrew’s pockets, like burying it for another twenty-seven years can somehow bury the confession as well. Even back then, when they were still something other than two strangers tied by an unfortunate, unwanted genetic bond, it was something they never talked about. In theory, it was about protecting Aaron – there were so many deaths that year that it had been all too easy to pin them all on one man, and talking about it would have drawn too much attention to the fact that Drake’s bludgeoned skull was nothing consistent with any of the others – but in practicality it’s always been about protecting Andrew. “We’re still not going to talk about it,” he orders, stabbing a finger against Aaron’s chest. “But yeah.”

They continue to the junkyard in silence, as long as Aaron can stand it. “You ever think about the fact that smashing heads is, apparently, your love language?”

Whether he has or hasn’t is immediately forgotten as the long-totaled remains of their mother’s car comes screeching around the curve of the road, engine revving, and swerves directly for them.

* * *

Kevin and Dan find their tokens at the old school. Dan disappears into the library for just over seven minutes, leaving the other three waiting in the hallway for any sign of distress. None ever comes, but she emerges looking shaking and pale and immediately steps into Kevin’s instinctive hug – they might be professional rivals now, and might have been friendly rivals before that, but they were friends first and have been since they were barely beyond toddler age. It’s second nature for him to offer a shoulder, especially when she looks frailer than she ever has.

Reciprocity comes in the way he finds his way out of the locker room later looking younger and smaller than ever and, though he turns without thinking to Neil, who slings an arm around his waist because he hasn’t been able to reach his shoulders since the seventh grade, he reaches a hand out and Dan grabs it instantly. “Hey, so,” and he squeezes her grip until both of their knuckles go a terrifying shade of white, “did all your teenage insecurities try and kill you in the library or was that just me?”

Dan hums an assent and pats his arm with her free hand, tucking herself shoulder to shoulder with Neil. “Yeah,” and her eyes aren’t looking at any of them, really, unfocused and afraid. “Yeah that’s pretty much exactly what happened.”

Nicky grins a wide, wild sort of grin and pushes his hands back into his hair. “Cool,” he says, mostly to himself, and he leaves his hair a mess when he drags his hands back out to fiddle nervously with his ring. “Cool, really can’t wait for this.” He fiddles a few seconds longer, and then his hands are back in his hair, tugging the thick curls out of his eyes and back across his scalp. Dan finally reaches into her pocket and brings out an elastic hair tie that she passes over without a word, and he secures the length into a messy bun. “God,” he breathes out, then in, then out again – all very measured, deliberate actions. “God, I am going to need _so much therapy_ if I survive this.”

They’ve probably all needed it for years, but it seems as though at least one of them is actually doing something about it. Neil might be impressed if he wasn’t far too busy wracking his brain to try and determine what exactly he’s supposed to be looking for today – the thing is, of all of them, Neil was probably the one who suffered the most that summer. He was kidnapped by a psychotic demon clown and tortured in a below ground prison for fourteen hours, the nightmares and scars of which had haunted him quite literally across two lifetimes now. His father was actually responsible for at least three of the murders in as many months but blamed for them all, serving seventeen consecutive life sentences out in Mount Olive. And then, somewhere between the time where he’d left the house for the first time in three days to escape his parents’ fighting and the time where he limped back to it in desperate need of his mother’s medical training, well—

Mary had been murdered.

Twenty-seven years later and he still isn’t sure who did it, Riko or Nathan. All he knows is that the last time he spoke to her was a whispered conversation before bed the night before everything happened, and the last time she spoke to _him_ was a frantically screamed ‘Neil, _RUN_!’ as his father’s drunken rage turned in the direction of his only son. He’d run, not looking back, out of the strange safety of his home and—

And he doesn’t remember the rest, until he does.

He’d woken up some time later in a dark, wet space with a pyramid of lights burnt into the back of his brain and a series of violent deaths burnt into his future, and then there had been Riko. And then there had been pain. And then there had been the way that Riko had flayed him with an almost childlike curiosity, digging various parts of his body down to the bone just to watch how it all worked, digging talon-like claws into his face and his skull whenever he tried to squint his eyes closed against the sight of his own blood, his own tendons, the raw meat twitching of the muscles of his abdomen and the way he could watch them contract whenever he opened his mouth to _scream_ and—

“Five things, Neil,” Kevin’s voice is low and soothing against his ear, the feeling of it a hum at his spine where it presses against him. They’re sitting on the floor, Neil locked against Kevin’s chest with an arm around his waist, and Dan and Nicky stand at either side like sentinels. There’s painful red crescents in the palms of his hands where he’s dug his own fingernails into them, the scar from their promise of so many years before a bridge between the marks. “Come on, buddy, five things.”

It’s been ages since he’s had a panic attack. “Matt’s old locker,” he lists the things he can see, the things that ground him to the here and now; it doesn’t quite help, not when the here and now is also the then, but it allows him to almost breathe for a minute. “The trophy case. The biology classroom. A water fountain. Your shoe’s untied.” Kevin glances down and mutters a gruff but relieved _fuck you_ when he sees that it isn’t, because it means Neil is feeling just better enough.

The arm at his stomach loosens. “Four things.”

Neil tugs himself free and rises on still somewhat unsteady legs to his feet. “Don’t have time. I’m fine.” A pointed stare from Kevin and a disbelieving sound from Nicky, and he shrugs. “Okay, I’m _functioning_.” It actually helps, the way Dan holds his hand the entire way back to the car; she squeezes his fingers whenever his steps slow or stumble, and whenever he looks over at her she smiles at him in the soft, sincere way she always used to and runs his thumb across his knuckles. It reminds him inexplicably, in all the ways that matter, of his mother.

Nicky slides behind the wheel and barely needs to adjust the seat from Kevin’s driving over. It’s unfamiliar, how much space he takes up now – like the twins he’d been small all through middle and high school, like the only way they knew to survive their tumultuous home life was by shrinking, by trying to _disappear_. Wherever Nicky disappeared off to as soon as he was able to escape was clearly somewhere safe, somewhere happy, because he’s _thrived_ since then. “Alright gang,” he tries to smile his best movie announcer voice, but instead just manages to sound barely this side of shitting himself terrified. “Next up on their hellacious dredge through past traumas, yours truly.”

And then he doesn’t go anywhere, not for a minute or so, but he clears his throat a few times and taps the steering wheel like in thought.

“Do,” Neil starts, hesitant; he still feels raw, like sandpaper has been dragged across the inside of his skin, but he also knows that Nicky’s childhood may have taught him how to vanish, but Neil’s taught him how to _survive_. “Do you want to go last?” It takes a moment, for either of them to really communicate what he’s offering. Neil still isn’t quite feeling one hundred percent of usual, which is actually a whole other level of usual for him, so he doesn’t quite now how to convey the offer as he means it. And Nicky, an older sibling by exactly six weeks and the virtue of proximity, still isn’t quite used to the idea of being the one protected.

Nicky gets it, and then he grins – a real grin this time, warm and bright. “I don’t want to go at all,” he admits, but turns the key to start the car, “but thanks for the offer, Neil.”

The old movie theater on Main Street looks exactly like it used to back in the 90s, and exactly like it used to when it was built back in the 20s. Even in their youth, when they were innocent and wonderous, it was an eerie and timeless sort of place – the lobby was all dark wood and red plush, bronze fixtures and marble steps. It was something that looked far more like the stage theaters of old, and might have been built with that in mind, but no one seemed to recall there ever being an actual stage production having been performed there. Instead, the main theater had two levels, a balcony and boxes and a small orchestra pit around the actual wooden stage, but instead of a curtain it had a projector screen and no one could ever recall there being anything else. Two smaller, narrower rooms to the far side of the lobby each had a more traditional set up, but each theater only sat about thirty-six people as opposed to the almost three hundred of the main.

It looks dark and uninhabited when they pull up out front, which isn’t actually surprising – the theater has closed and reopened “under new management” more times than they can count, never gone for more than a few months before the family that owns it, that _has_ owned it, causes enough of a clamor to justify resuming their business. Both of the narrow, wood and bronze double doors on either side of the front are locked shut with chains and padlocks, and there’s a bright red CLOSED sign slashing across the domed ticket window between them.

“They do this every spring,” Nicky confides as one of the others makes some small noise of disappointment – not that it’s closed. None of them have enough of a bond left with this town to feel nostalgic for even this building, one of the castles of their childhood adventures. It’s more the disappointment that their quest has come to a temporary end, or at least taken a much sharper turn. “Close down like it’s forever. Mr. Samuels says it gets everyone anxious for things to do once school lets out, so when he reopens right before summer all the families flock to multiple showings just to keep it in business.”

It’s a tidbit of their past that Neil doesn’t remember, and doesn’t necessarily mind having forgotten. “So what’s the plan?” Dan is still sitting with Neil, but she’d released his hand at some point on the drive over – probably right around the time he’d realized he couldn’t remember the last time anyone had held his hand like this, and drawn away. Instead, hers had retreated into her pocket where he assumed her token was stored. It had seemed somehow impolite to ask.

As they watch, Nicky leaves the car running and the door open as he climbs out; he turns back to them at the entrance, and tries (and fails) for a crooked grin. “Wanna bet the key is still hidden in the same spot?”

It is.

The lock clicks open easily, dragging the heavy chain loose of the ornate curl of the door handles, and it lands coiled at Nicky’s feet like a snake with a dull thud; the door, conversely, creaks open with a sort of agonized, wounded groan that sounds like a dying animal, and startles an equally wounded laugh from Nicky. “Oh fuck me,” he stands rooted to the spot, staring into the darkness of the abandoned theater, “ _oooh_ I can already tell it’s gonna suck when I go in there.”

Whatever happened back at the school must have sucked just as much, because Dan and Kevin wordless unstrap their seat belts and go through the steps of parking the car properly. “We’re coming in,” Dan calls through the still open door. “It’s too big a building to stay outside, we’d never hear if anything went wrong.” They both clearly have an idea of what, exactly, can or will go wrong, because they’re at Nicky’s side before Neil realizes they’re moving – he thinks he should be scared, worried for what comes next. His token is the next one up, and if Riko is already trying to stop them he’ll likely stop at nothing when he realizes they’re closer to the ritual. Instead, all he can think is that he still has no idea what he might be able to find left in this town that means enough to him to be sacrificed.

He follows them anyway. Maybe he’ll think of something.

Nicky’s already talking when they join him in the lobby, running familiar hands along the worn smooth wood of the ticket booth, the concession stand. “We were, what, sophomores in high school when I came out? Juniors?” They’d been a mix of fifteen and sixteen on the New Year’s Eve when Nicky quietly and quickly dropped the words into the silence between them, grown comfortable with the late hour. He and Allison had only broken up a week or two before Christmas, but their parting had happened in the same quiet, gentle sort of way as their entire relationship: as friends first. They’d been drinking, and Allison and Seth had disappeared together more than once, and it was just thirty-something minutes before midnight when Nicky had worried the loose thread of his sleeping bag enough to work up the courage to smile at them with a simple _I’m gay_ that might have left some of them surprised but none of them shocked.

Dan smiles at the memory. They’d all been radiantly proud of Nicky, because they loved him, but also because they knew he couldn’t be proud of himself – not while he still lived in West Virginia, under his father’s roof. “You might not have beaten Andrew,” she teases, and it may have only been a day for the majority of them but the knowledge had slotted into place as easily as they’d slotted back together, like everything and everyone had always been there, “but you beat Ellen. That’s gotta be worth something, right?”

He doesn’t smile, lost in thoughts or memories or maybe just a little bit fear. “Anyway, I knew like, _way_ before then. I knew, I was just… I don’t know, in denial? Scared?” Knowing their town, and his father, it was likely a combination of the two. Nicky had been the first of them to leave, packing a single bag and kissing them all on the cheek the day after their high school graduation, and it hadn’t seemed strange that he didn’t come back as the summer progressed. Neil isn’t sure exactly what happened the night of their graduation, only that Nicky and Luther had fought – fought to the point of the twins getting involved, as well as the police. “And that first week, after—” His face and his voice fall. “When we were all fighting, I… there was a boy.”

He runs his hands longingly across the cold glass of the windows, across the knobs of carvings in the wooden walls. He feels his way through the lobby by touch and memory alone, allowing his steps to guide him back in time nearly thirty years. “I don’t even remember his name. Isn’t that wild? My first… I guess it was my first date? Such a big deal for me at the time, _life changing_ , and I can’t even remember his name.” Nicky has been married, Neil learned at dinner, to a man named Erik for just about twenty years now – they had apparently met back in high school, through a pen pal program in Nicky’s German class, and now split their time between the two countries.

Nicky hesitates at the double doors that lead to the lower deck of the main theater, hands hovering over the curled handles. “I guess it doesn’t matter… toward the end of the movie he left to go to the bathroom and,” his hands spasm shut, clenching the bronze loops painfully, “and he never came back. I waited until every one else left for the night, just sat and waited, and—” He throws the doors open with an echoing _bang_ , a hollow sort of ringing sound that swirls like the dust through the air, and the narrow sliver of light reaches only a few rows in. “And that’s when the fucking clown came at me.”

He slaps a palm over the light switch, and nothing happens.

Oh, Neil realizes suddenly. It’s gonna be like _that_.

“Hey,” he says quietly, as quiet as the theater that stretches stagnant and stale like a tomb before them, and he presses his cell phone against Nicky’s white knuckles. The flashlight is already on. “Hey, we’re right here. Just yell if you need us, okay?”

Dan and Kevin get out their own phones, lights extended, and it still only covers the first ten rows. The stage and the screen are lost to the darkness, and Nicky swallows nervously. “I changed my mind,” he whispers. “I want to go last.” But he swallows it down, and he releases the doors, and he walks into the theater.

Less than a minute later, from the cloying darkness of the abandoned theater, they hear Nicky let out a sharp, terrified scream, and then nothing at all.

* * *

Their mother’s 1992 Toyota Camry, which was destroyed in the same crash that killed her in 1994, catches Andrew’s hip as it swerves directly for Aaron, missing him only by virtue of the twins both immediately shoving the other out of the way. They regain their feet long before it’s able to cut a jagged, unnatural U-turn across a faded brown lawn, shoving and pulling the other into a frantic run the last half a block to the junkyard.

“Aaron Michael!” the distant, disembodied voice of their long dead mother calls, and Aaron trips over his own feet. It’s only Andrew, hand locked around his brother’s wrist, all but dragging him that keeps him moving forward, though at more of a stumbling pace. Every punctuation of Tilda’s long forgotten voice falters his steps further, until Andrew stops pulling him forward and starts pulling and pushing him to the sides, all directions to dodge the wild and impossible vehicle that chases them. “Aaron! Michael!” the voice screeches every time, a snap of a command like she always used to in the way that always meant trouble.

For some reason, Aaron was always in trouble.

It should have been Andrew – Aaron might have been the fighter, but only because Andrew was the instigator. Andrew was a menace in every definition of the words, but Aaron was… He was always the better student and always respectful at home, and always tried his hardest to make their mother happy, to earn her praise. And yet it was Aaron who took the brunt of their mother’s unpredictable temper, taking the lashes of her verbal abuse up until the summer Aaron got his first girlfriend. Tilda was angrier that summer, angrier than she’d ever been, and one night she’d turned more than just words against her son; she’d hit him, once, right across the face and into the wall, and the following day she and Andrew had gone for a drive and then—

Well.

There was a reason they had been making their way to the junkyard, after all.

The car jumps the curb, chasing them along the sidewalk, with their mother’s voice screeching like the shrill honking the horn. “You’re fucking useless,” she screams at them, or maybe just at Aaron – she’d never bothered with Andrew much in the way Riko hadn’t; because they knew he could never be afraid of them. He’d already been haunted long before either of them had a mind to try. “You worthless piece of shit, you ruined my life!”

Aaron hesitates like he wants to stop, like he’s _listening_ , and Andrew tugs at his hand again. “Az, it’s the fucking clown, it’s not her.” It doesn’t matter that it isn’t – she’d said the same things when she was alive. Tilda might have hated both of her children, but Andrew had hated her in return. Aaron had sought out his mother’s approval even when every attempt was met with greater and greater abuse, and whatever the shade wearing their mother’s face might be slinging at them, it’s nothing if not the truth. “Don’t listen to her, listen to _me_ —”

“I tried to give you up when you were born but no one _wanted you_!” The car is no closer now, but no farther away. It dogs them from a constant, consistent two feet of distance, and the noise it makes as the engine growls just behind them provides a terrifyingly discordant echo to her words. Andrew thinks, on some level, this is worse than if it sped up just enough to run them down – there’s heat on the back of his legs and a growling engine he can feel beneath his feet and he can’t run any faster, he physically _can’t_ , but even the parts of his brain that are aware of this fact are screaming in pure terror for him to _try_. “I didn’t even want you, you were like _bugs_ infesting my home, so I did what you do with spiders or bugs and I filled the tub and I tried to _drown you—_ ”

They break the line of the junkyard gates and the screaming cuts off in a screech of brakes and a tortured, tangle of metal crashing in on itself, and the car accordions in on nothing at all like it had when it struck the guardrail all those years ago.

Andrew’s hand clenches around Aaron’s, knuckles white, and squeezes as Aaron crouches over, gasping for breath. “It was telling the truth,” Aaron’s voice is hoarse, ragged, wet with tears and maybe a little bit with the realizations the words have brought to light. “It’s the truth, she must have… Haven’t you ever wondered why we lived with Uncle Luther, why she was never around when we were little, she must have—”

He hadn’t. Not even once. Andrew had spent so much of his time hating their living arrangements that he had never stopped to try and understand them. He knew they had been born in California, knew from the photos in the albums or on the walls that they had lived in Palmetto not by their first birthday, but by the Christmas after. Knew that there were not many photos or memories of their mother in those early years, but there were enough. Mostly, he remembers that all three boys had shared a room at the end of the hallway until Tilda had died, and then Luther had cleared out the office on the first floor and it had been turned into a room for Nicky. “So she tried to kill us,” he thinks it should bother him more, but is pleased that it doesn’t. “Big fucking deal, who _hasn’t_ at this point?”

Aaron looks completely appalled. “What the fuck, Andrew, she was our _mother_.”

“But she wasn’t our _family_ ,” he snarls, and he tugs Aaron close against his side, hissing up the half an inch of height difference between them. “Luther hated us too, who gives a fuck. The only reason you feel like this is fucked up is because you think that just because _they_ didn’t love you that no one in your life did.”

It had taken quite a few years of therapy that never seemed to find a cause for the darkness that had settled in Andrew’s brain as long as he could remember, and exactly one emergency after hours appointment after Renee had called and he _did_ , for Andrew to find his peace. He tries, in the sharpness and anger that is sometimes the only way he knows how, to share it with his brother. “I am never going to be able to explain to Kate that you’re going to be at my house all the fucking time now,” he doesn’t sound unhappy at the idea. “But I assume you’re going to be.”

“Fuck you, just tell Katelyn to accept a position at Johns Hopkins,” and Andrew sort of _does_. “Nicky and I already live in the same metro area, why do we all have to come out to fucking _Chicago_?”

There is a twenty-year gap in their relationship, one filled with awkward holidays dinners and distances enforced against their will. There is a wife who barely knows the family she married into and a niece who barely knows that she has an uncle, and there is an assistant who know the number one rule of his job is that he is to always dodge calls from his boss’s family. And still, alongside all that, there is a pair of brothers – mirror images – who were never meant to be alive three times over now and have survived, who might have lost their memories and very nearly their minds, but they haven’t lost _this_. Aaron squeezes Andrew’s hand in his own and also his shoulders against his own in a hug, and he grins. “Yeah, I love you too or whatever.”

They find what they’re looking for at the bottom of a teetering mountain of scrap in one of the far corners of the junkyard; the remains of Tilda’s sedan look very similar to the ghostly one that might still sit at the entrance, only this one – the real one – looks dusty in a faded, forgotten sort of way. The cracks of the windshield have finally broken, clattering inward from age rather than exploding out from the force of the collision, and Aaron knows that there’s a matching spiderweb across the passenger window from where Andrew hit in the rollover. There’s no blood or body left in the car, those are all long gone, but he supposes there shouldn’t be any personal effects either. Still, when he takes an elbow to the window of the driver side and leans through the door, he emerges victorious with the keys in hand.

“Alright,” he jingles them, getting Andrew’s attention, and then he stuffs them into his pocket so he won’t lose them. “Time to go.”

Andrew’s face is drawn and pinched, glaring at his brother nearly as much as he is the car, or the keys, or the memories. “Your token are the keys?” Its obvious, really. “But... she didn’t die that summer.”

He says it like there’s some set of rules for all this, some guidelines of demons and magic that these tokens of theirs have to follow, when really he barely understands what’s happening aside from that it is. But Renee had been clear, or as clear as she ever was. “Yeah,” Aaron agrees, “but I didn’t actually know how else to represent it so we’re just going with it.” The version of their mother’s car that had chased them the last few blocks is gone now, and the street is quiet. They turn back toward the park, where Matt and Allison hopefully still wait, and they walk in something almost like a companionable quiet. “It’s you, by the way.”

“Me?”

Aaron hmms an agreement. “That last week we were all fighting, you were really on edge – I think you were mad at Neil, or just that he wasn’t around, and she—” He falters over the word, but he doesn’t call her _Mom_. It’s progress. “She was screaming at me, and you got up in her face and just… God, Drew, you told her if she even _looked_ at me again you would kill her, and I knew you meant it.” He looks over, far too fond for someone recalling such violent, unhappy memories. “That was the only reason I went down into the sewers. Because I knew my brother would keep me safe.”

It’s not a smile, but a snarl that acknowledges the sentiment. “Ugh,” Andrew looks absolutely _disgusted_. “I love you too, or what the fuck ever.”

* * *

The theater is still dark when they burst in, staggering in the narrow field of light from their phones, but no one is to be found; they’ve been guarding the only door in or out, which means Nicky has to be in here somewhere. The seats, however, as well as the stage, are empty.

“Nicky?” Dan calls, and holds the feeble glow of her phone over her head, trying to spread its glow. “Are you in here?”

There’s a sudden, insistent clatter from the stage, a buzzing like angry bees – it starts and stops and starts again, and they only recognize it for the vibrating ring of a cell phone when Kevin, phone to his ear, grimaces. “He’s not answering,” he says like they haven’t already noticed. “But I can hear it.” They can finally see it too, the closer they creep down the aisles – Neil’s phone, light turned off, is resting face down in the middle of the stage, vibrating with the incoming call. The last time they had seen it was pressed into Nicky’s hand.

“Nicky!” Neil calls, louder this time. There’s no answer, but there’s a steady heartbeat-like sound from somewhere in the darkness nearby; it _thump thump thumps_ in the same rhythmic beat of Neil’s heart in his ears, of his footsteps on the stage. _Thump thump thump_. “Something is out there,” he whispers, but it’s like an explosion in the otherwise silence of the theater. He might as well have screamed it, despite the fact that Dan and Kevin are only inches away, pressed against each arm so they won’t lose each other in the darkness.

They hear the giggling before they hear anything else.

It’s not like a child’s, or even like a man’s – it’s a noise that sounds very much like air escaping a balloon, or like a bottle rocket charging by an ear. It’s something high and reedy but altogether dissident, and it sends shivers down their spines because it just doesn’t sound like anything that could ever be natural. Not in this world, at least. “Do you like magic tricks?” the matching voice – Riko’s voice – comes from the shadows that surround them. There’s a current of laughter in the words as much as there is of malice, and then there’s the soft _tap tap tap_ of slippered feet coming toward them that sounds nothing at all like the _thump thump thumpthumpthump_ of their hearts or of the building. “I love magic tricks,” Riko giggles as his footsteps grow closer. “I made Nicky **_disappear_**!” He shrieks, and then there is silence. The light coming in from the door seems a bit brighter now, and the darkness left behind seems a little less, well, dark.

There’s no feeling at the backs of their necks that something is coming, but there’s still the _thumpthumpthump_ of their hearts echoing in their skulls, and also of something hitting the floor of the stage and— “The trapdoor!” Kevin drops to his hands and knees and begins scrabbling along the wood of the stage, fingers extended. “The Houdini trapdoor, he’s got to be under it!” It was yet another legend of the town, as unverified as the others, that Harry Houdini had performed a show at the theater back in the late 20s, only a year before his death; they said that was the reason for the trapdoor in the stage, his act, though there were no newspapers in the records at the library mentioning the performance and the trapdoor was listed in the blueprints for the building from years before.

As he searches the smooth cedar wood planks for something that doesn’t belong and, just maybe, doesn’t exist, Neil kneels and raises a fist. _Thump_ , he punches into the floor. _Thump_.

 _Thumpthumpthump_ comes from somewhere to his left, a frantic sort of noise. _Thumpthump thump thump_.

“It’s over here!” he calls, moving toward the noise, and the others sprint to help; it feels like far too many minutes too long before they discovered the catch cleverly hidden beneath a particularly red-gold board, but when they do a square of the stage drops down into the darkness. When it does, it reveals the heavy glass tank beneath that is filled nearly to the ceiling with dirty water, and Nicky’s frantic thrashing. “What the _fuck_ ,” Neil clamors into action, his words echoed by the others, as they reach in and start to pull him out.

Nicky is soaked to the bone and freezing cold, skin like ice in temperature and color, and he spits what seems to be an entire gallon of water but far more likely only a few tablespoons at Dan’s feet. He doesn’t stop shaking. “We did it,” he finally gets his hands to work well enough to release the death grip he has on his own fists, revealing a soggy ticket stub for _Jurassic Park_ – that must have been from their date. Neil wants to tell him that it’s not important, some stupid token, except that it kind of is; but then Nicky grins, and too late he realizes they’re having two different conversations. “We proved Houdini came to town.”

* * *

The old Wesninski family home is abandoned, _has_ been, like maybe despite every drop of darkness that had bled into this town over the centuries, the curse they had all grown indifferent to, they drew the line at living in a home that once belonged to a serial killer.

It is not resting quiet and forgotten on some old and out of the way street somewhere, not abandoned like the town had grown too large too fast and then shrunk in on the only parts of itself it could support. It’s not like old high school, or the old department store, or the entire neighborhood on the south end of town that had been far too ambitious for a small West Virginian community. Instead, the house perches dark and dusty and disused on the plot of land that had been gifted back for nature to reclaim, only appears as though even nature has no longer wanted – the grass is long, or it is dead, in patches, and the trees have retained a bit of the wild but only in the shaggy dog way of things domesticated left to fend for themselves. The paint is stripping and the windows are all boarded up and there’s a gorgeous redwood beam privacy fence around the property that was never there in his youth, like maybe the neighborhood hasn’t been able to _forget_ what happened in the otherwise unassuming home, but they’ve tried to hide it.

Neil’s mother died in that house.

Even before he’d forgotten, he hadn’t come back here. They’d dragged themselves out of the sewers, dirty and half-defeated, and found that instead of the few hours they’d thought it had been they had been missing for an entire day, and everyone had rushed home to parents and punishments and— And Neil had spared exactly one thought for the moment he ran out on, had allowed exactly one realization that he had been gone a good deal longer than the twenty-seven hours of the others, and he had gone to Kevin’s.

The state troopers had already been at Wymack’s, which was a blessing, because they were able to craft the details of the story they would later pass on to the others and all stick to for the next few years of their lives. They told how Neil had called Kevin on the phone, screaming and sobbing in the background, and how they had managed to sneak him out. How they had run, terrified, into the forest where the whole god damn town knew they had a clubhouse of some kind, and managed to hide out there until they felt safe enough to return. No one ever asked how they could have been missed in the search, given that the rough-hewn subterranean structure Matt had painstakingly built around them was the first place they had looked, because at that point the officers came to the sudden and unwanted realization that, at no point in the nearly two days he’d been missing, had Neil found out that his mother had died.

Their injuries, like so many of the deaths of the preceding few months, had been added to Nathan’s ever-growing list of crimes.

He’d gone to the funeral, but he hadn’t kept to any of the traditions; his uncle Stuart, who he had met only twice previously, flew out from England before Neil was even released from the cursory hospital visit the troopers had driven him to (most of the injuries he’d endured at Riko’s hands had been some form of waking nightmare, things he could feel and could see and could _taste_ , but hadn’t existed in any physical form. Not all, though. There were cuts and bruises to be looked at and glued back together, and there were scars that never faded.) and handled everything in the quiet, competent way he did everything else. He never once challenged Wymack for custody, and he left when the week of _shiva_ was over.

That was the last moment of his life that he’d been Nathaniel Wesninski.

He’d always been Neil – Nate was his father’s nickname, and so he had been Neil from the time he was very small, both of them two halves of the same name – and there was a very extended discussion about whether he would be a Wymack or a Day, but instead he had become a Josten. Potentially the only, they’d never checked, but it was a name they created for him one late summer day when the countdown to the start of high school had gone down to the single digits and he was worried, panicking, that he would have to bear his father’s name for another four years. (He already bore his face, and his scars, and his legacy. There was no helping it.) There had never been talk of him being a Hatford – not even Mary had kept any fondness for her maiden name or the family that held it, moving across an ocean to get away from it all.

It was Seth who coined the name for him, slyly, around an otherwise expressionless face that was the reason most everyone who was not them thought of him as a stern, serious young man. _Get it_ , he drawled out in his warm, glowing tenor that so many people rarely got to hear, because he was also the one of them that spoke least – Seth was always unexpected in the best possible ways, constantly surprising them with the dry wit that spent far too much time hiding beneath a stone face and a silent boy who loved numbers and patterns, but mostly his friends. _Because there’s jos ten of us_ and it had been so ugly and unwanted that Neil had immediately adored it.

He stands in front of his childhood home, or the corpse of it, and it feels the tug of familiarity but no other feelings for it, because the child that lived there has been gone since that same summer as the rest of its inhabitants.

The front door is locked, which strikes him as terribly funny – every single window is missing its glass, and the back door is half off its hinges, but the front door is carefully locked and deadbolted like someone meant to keep the remaining belongings safe before abandoning them. They sneak in through the kitchen, tearing the door the rest of the way off, and all four of them hesitate in the achingly familiar but now ultimately forgotten room; the yellow wallpaper is stained like a smoker’s teeth, and the air smells like a foul mix of spoiled food and antiseptics. Neil lingers only a moment at the fridge, at the photos and notes that still cling to it, and he touches the dishtowel that is tucked through the door. It doesn’t feel like it should be his token, but it reminds him altogether of his mother; it has her softness and the same shade of pink as her lips, and he brushes it against his forehead like a kiss before moving on.

“Fuck this,” Dan whispers fiercely, hand locked around his again. Kevin takes Neil’s other hand in his own, and Nicky grabs a shoulder. “Fuck _this_ , we’re not letting you go through this alone.” They all know as well as he does that he hasn’t been back since that day, not even to get his things – his uncle and Wymack had filled a bag with some clothes, and then each had thought the other arranged for the rest of it to be dealt with and Neil had never had the energy to care that it hadn’t.

They follow him upstairs, to the quiet corner room that had been his. Neil pushes open the door, and immediately knows what his token is by the way the very sight of it punches him in the gut, reopens old wounds real and imaginary across his skin, feels hot and tight like he’s splitting open – he hasn’t actually seen a photo of his mother since the funeral. There hadn’t been any at Wymack’s house, of course, and no one had ever seemed to want to go back to his for one; it didn’t help, of course, that nearly all the photos around the house were of the whole family, and the last thing anyone wanted after that summer was a photo of Nathan Wesninski, the Palmetto Child Butcher, smiling out at them.

Mary is smiling a soft, serene sort of smile, and she’s dressed for work – on her way to, not coming home from, because her makeup hasn’t been smudged yet. Her skin is slightly darker than Neil’s like it always used to get in the summers, and her hair is pulled tight into a braid that wraps around her head like a crown, and she’s only an inch taller than Neil was. She has him tucked into a protective, possessive looking hug, and he can tell with the perfect vision of hindsight that his father must be behind the camera from the way she’s angled Neil behind her. He recognizes from the background and from his outfit that it was taken at the celebration of his completing middle school, which means, quite probably, that this is the last photo of them ever taken before she died.

Whatever noise that escapes him must somehow explain all of this to the others, because Dan squeezes his hand tighter and Nicky pulls him into a hug, and Kevin crosses the room to tenderly take the photo from its spot on the old bedside table, and he slides it into his pocket without a word.

Finally his feet remember how to work, and he walks a slow circuit of the space that was his sanctuary for thirteen years; there’s all sorts of forgotten touches of his childhood, photos of the group together at various ages or toys lying discarded or a favorite pair of shoes that might actually still fit him, if he bothered to try. He stuffs a few of them into the backpack he finds hanging on the closet door, things that he tells the others are for posterity’s sake but privately tells himself will help him _remember_ – none of them have discussed the way they’re all terrified of surviving this, mostly because it means they might forget again. When he reaches the dresser, he finds his old Zippo lighter, and he laughs. “Oh shit,” the words are punched from him with a different sort of force than his mother’s face had struck him with, something fonder and funnier. “Hey Nicky,” he calls, and he holds it up.

Nicky cackles, and Kevin frowns. “You better not suddenly take up smoking because you’ve remembered your teen years,” his chastising is the same of the last fifteen years, something that belongs solely to them. “We’ve got the goddamn Olympics coming up.”

“I’ve literally never smoked a cigarette in my life,” he swears, and then frowns because he feels like it’s true but he also remembers – he remembers ditching classes in the afternoons to go with Allison when she would sneak behind the bleachers and smoke, and he remembers climbing to the roof of Wymack’s house and the heavy scent of nicotine when he and Andrew would sit in silence and look at the stars. He’s suddenly not sure which is the truth.

Kevin frowns, but Nicky grins. “Can confirm. He only carried that thing around every day because Andrew could never keep track of a lighter to save his life.” He laughs it off like it’s some old joke of theirs, and the memories slot into place in Neil’s head. The smell of cigarettes has always been comforting, and now he knows why; he also knows why he’s never felt the urge to smoke one, no matter how familiar they might have felt to him. “You know that’s like, ninety percent of the reason he finally ended up quitting? Because he could never keep track of a single damn lighter for longer than a day.” Because he’d never needed to – Neil had been carrying this one since they were fifteen.

He pockets it. Mostly because it feels familiar to do so, but also because he tells himself it might come in handy later – there’s no telling what the rest of the day might bring.

* * *

They all gather back at the House late in the afternoon, mostly to regroup; the plan is to complete the ritual the following morning, to give them a night to sleep if they can, but at the very least to recover from their days – Neil figures himself lucky, only facing emotional loss. He knows that the others faced something far worse, though no one seems to want to discuss it. Renee meets them there with a full table of take out from the Mexican place down the street, but no one seems to want to eat, either.

“So,” she asks in her steady, serene way, “how did it go?”

Allison glares, looking like she’s aged twenty years, and drops onto the couch beside Neil before sinking against him, head on his shoulder and legs slung across his lap. Nicky takes her other side and collapses in much the same manner, their combined weight pressing Neil painfully into the arm of the couch. “Went great,” Aaron snarls, and ignores the food entirely to help himself to one of the bottles of alcohol resting above the cabinet – they’re not entirely sure who they belong to, if they do at all, but he doesn’t seem to care. “Really glad we had this experience.” The bottle of whiskey takes a second too long to open, so he rattles it heavily back into place in favor of the neighboring tequila. Renee looks properly cowed – just as easy as it is for them to forget that all of this is still _normal_ to her, it’s just as easy to forget that, for them, it no longer is.

In a silent clatter of boots and bad attitude, Andrew ignores them all to go upstairs – he pauses, just for a moment, when Aaron grunts an inquisitive sort of noise, which seems to be an answer all its own, because Aaron toasts him before he disappears.

“He had a lot of feelings today,” he explains dryly, and starts pouring the tequila into whatever cups he can find. There’s only four shot glasses, but he finds another four coffee mugs in a separate cabinet and begins filling those next.

He hands one of the mugs to Matt and another to Nicky, and then he presses one against the back of Neil’s hand as well – one of the things that their return to this town have reminded them is that Neil and Aaron have never actually been friends, though they’ve always been friendly, but also they probably know each other better than most anyone else in their group. It’s the hazard, or the blessing, of sharing someone they way they’ve shared Andrew their entire lives. Neil smiles a faint thanks, and taps the rim of his mug against the open bottle in Aaron’s hand. “Cheers, Az.”

It breaks a bit of the exhausted, melancholy mood they’ve acquired over the day. A few of them start picking at the selection of various street tacos or enchiladas, but mostly they just sit as close as they can to the others and find their comfort in numbers, or proximity. They all hold a cup, though no one really drinks – it doesn’t feel safe, intoxication, thought the idea is more than appealing. There’s a bit of scattered conversation as they graze, asking after families that they’re only just learning about; Aaron has a daughter, eight years old now, who seems as much a stranger to Nicky as she is to Dan, who asks. Renee politely asks how Thea is doing, though there isn’t much to tell. She’s convinced this baby is going to come later than her due date only by virtue of a mother’s intuition, though her doctor warns her it’s more likely to be a week or so before given everything he’s seen in the examinations.

Somewhere around the first sip of alcohol and the second taco, Allison admits that she filed for divorce at the airport, waiting for her flight to depart. She doesn’t offer details, but she doesn’t need to – Neil is achingly proud of her, and whispers as much. Instead of acknowledging it she merely draws his attention to the way that Matt and Dan have, over the course of the last half hour, migrated from sitting near each other to sitting nearly on top of each other. It’s something they’ve all been waiting for since they were teenagers, even though nothing seems to have happened – yet. They share a grin that lasts right up until the point Renee excuses herself. “I need to go to the library,” she says. “I have the books on the ritual there.”

Nicky stands as well, and grabs one of the plates from the table. “I’m going with you. Seriously, Renee, splitting up is dumb as hell.” It’s a complicated process, their leaving – the library is only a five minute walk but it becomes some elaborate operation, setting alarms on phones to call in five minutes, in ten, and others on Dan and Kevin’s phones that they’re to bring everyone after them if they haven’t heard anything by a certain time. By the time the two of them finally do make it out the front door, it would have been easier and nearly quicker to just bring the entire group along with them. Conversation returns, but with less enthusiasm; they’re all distracted by the sudden separation and the potential of what could occur in the meantime.

Upstairs, there’s a muffled sound of shampoo bottles crashing to the floor from the bathroom, but no screech of the pipes to the shower – it seems as though Andrew is in a mood. Then there’s a second sound, this time a door slamming, and then—

“Abram,” he sounds very calm and very steady, except that it’s a name he so rarely uses; Neil is instantly on his feet, forcing out from beneath the weight of Allison, and partway across the room. “Bring the tequila,” he calls, and he appears at the turn of the staircase with his front soaked in blood, most of it coming from the jagged, open hole in his cheek. When he grins a manic, craggy grin, Neil can see muscle and teeth and tongue through the gap. “And a towel. And also my brother.”

Aaron gapes at the sight. “Jesus _fuck_ , Andrew,” and he’s not the sort of doctor who deals with this, not really, but he jumps to help like he could be. Neil doesn’t have a towel and hadn’t stopped to grab one once he’d seen what was happening, instead shrugging out of his sweatshirt and shoving it against Andrew’s face; it doesn’t seem to help, not really, but the hiss of irritation Andrew lets out distracts him long enough for Aaron to arrive with first aid kit in hand, thoughtfully provided by Kevin. “What the fuck happened?”

“Was it the clown?” The others press just this side of too close as well, crowding around, but Matt plants himself with arms crossed to clear a space for Aaron to work.

There’s a tugging motion of Andrew’s visible cheek like he wants to laugh, and then a wince when he realizes how terrible an idea that would be. When Neil moves the sweatshirt at Aaron’s command they see the wound is not as large as they thought, but goes clear through the entirety of his face. “Your dad’s in the bathroom,” he says simply, like it’s not an earth-shattering piece of information in and of itself. “He stabbed me.”

There’s a shout from someone, or somewhere, and Matt and Kevin sprint up the stairs together; Dan, the more sensible of them, pulls out her phone to contact the police. Nathan is, or is supposed to be, in a maximum-security prison _miles_ from Palmetto, and if it’s truly him and not just some illusion meant to torment them, then this is something far beyond their scope. “You’re not supposed to pull the knife out,” Aaron scolds, like somehow that’s the major problem here, “when you get stabbed. Come on, Drew, you _know_ this.”

“In my defense,” Andrew shuffles against the number of hands holding him up, and then manages to shrug when a few of them release him. “I only did it so I could stab him back.”

The sound that rips unbidden from Neil’s mouth can be called nothing but a giggle; it’s nowhere near an appropriate time for anything resembling joy, and yet— “You got stabbed in the face,” he confirms, or maybe just questions. It’s hard to tell if he’s delighted or just in disbelief. “By an escaped serial killer, and you… pulled out the knife to stab back?”

Pride, and pain, turn Andrew’s hazel eyes gold. “It seemed like the polite thing to do, yeah.”

Neil cups a hand around Andrew’s undamaged cheek gently, jostling Aaron out of the way, and all but cracks his own face open with the width of his smile. “You are _un-fucking-believable_.”

The commotion upstairs makes its way closer, and then Kevin and Matt thunder back into view; Matt’s hands have blood on them but they are otherwise unharmed, and neither looks even particularly out of breath. “Your dad’s out of prison,” Kevin says calmly, and crouches down to investigate the line of stitches Aaron is currently working into his brother’s flesh. It seems to have been something in the family of good luck, the way the blade must have caught him at just the right moment – there’s no damage to anything but the skin between his lips and his jaw, like it slid in exactly as his mouth was opening in a yell, catching only thin muscle and the layers of skin and missing bone and joint. “Also, pretty sure the clown is involved.”

Matt finishes wiping his hands on Neil’s discarded sweatshirt, already filthy with blood, and shrugs in explanation. “He jumped out the window and took off down the street,” but there’s something they’re avoiding; Neil can tell by the way neither of them seemed too concerned by the fact that, on top of everything else, they now have to deal with this as well. It’s the lack of reaction that reads more as shock than anything else. “Oh, also? Nice aim, dude.”

The jagged black line of knots across Andrew’s cheek makes his sharklike grin appear even more cruel, more threatening; this is the Andrew the rest of the world always saw when they were teens, the one who started fights specifically because he knew he would not lose but the idea of not trying was too boring to entertain. “Not good enough, if he escaped.”

The shock of the situation finally catches up to Kevin, who barks a laugh. “It was hilt deep in his chest.”

The grin drops. “Fucking clown.”

Interruption comes in the form of Kevin’s phone ringing suddenly in an unfamiliar ringtone – Thea’s and Neil’s are both Disney songs and everyone related to the team is the same Red Hot Chili Peppers song that they always play during practices and everyone else is one of the default noises that came on his phone when he got it, but this is something else. – and he fumbles it out of his pocket, most of them expecting it to be an untraceable number or, somehow, even Riko. Instead, it’s Nicky. “Hey,” comes his voice through the speakers, distant and undisturbed, “you told me to call you every few minutes to make sure I hadn’t like, fallen into another death trap or whatever.”

Voices overlap over each other as each of them tries to explain what’s happening. It’s only Andrew, still patiently allowing his brother to stab at the wound on his face, and Neil, who watches, who aren’t clamoring around the speaker of Kevin’s cell phone. Instead, Andrew raises an eyebrow, and Neil sighs heavily. “Fuck,” he mutters, “you’re right.”

Aaron flaps a hand at him from where he finishes the stitches, reaching into the kit for a tube of antibacterial cream. “I got this one,” he says without looking up. “You get Nicky.”

He’s already running for the door before the others notice, Kevin yelling something down the line to Nicky (and Neil hopes it’s an explanation, a warning, but he’s not sure Kevin’s quite realized what’s happening) and Matt yelling something across the room to Neil, and then there’s nothing but the cool breeze on his face and the unfamiliar air in his lungs and the pounding of his feet against the pavement as he tries to remember where exactly the library is in relation to him. Behind him he can hear the familiar sound of a mass of people in desperate pursuit, which he assumes are the others – minus the twins – because they feel exactly the same at his back as his team does on the court. And then, finally, only a too long, very few minutes later, he can see the library. The lights are off, which doesn’t surprise him – Palmetto had always been the sort of town where most things were closed and locked by five o’clock, with the exceptions of the few restaurants or diners that stayed open for dinner, and the movie theater during the summer months. It’s well into an evening of the off-season, and it doesn’t surprise him that the lights are off and the parking lot empty.

It doesn’t exactly surprise him that the front door is open, either, but for an entirely different reason.

He makes his way as quietly across the yellowed linoleum as he is able, ducking behind shelves or carts of books whenever he gets the chance, and hears the hurried whispers that he knows mean at least Matt and Kevin have followed him, and are just now hitting the entrance. Ahead of him, where the hallway of the entrance meets the returns and check-out desk, there’s a wavering glow of light; around that corner, he knows, is the main room of the library, complete with the copy machine and the few study tables and no further places to hide. And then he hears giggling, frantic barking giggles, the sort of insane, otherworldly laughter that he’s come to recognize as Riko’s only it isn’t, it’s a voice that he only remembers by the way it makes his blood run cold.

His father is here.

There’s something to be said for the fact that Neil is, despite all the ways he’s tried to erase it, his father’s son – the _Junior_. He might no longer bear his name, but he bears his scars and his shame and, a little bit, his legacy. He doesn’t even hesitate in the action of slamming an elbow through the glass display of the history of Palmetto, the one that has sat dusty and disinteresting since he was a toddler, and grabbing the first object his hand closes around and swinging it, as hard as he can, into the first soft part of his father he can reach. And then, because he’s not his father’s son any more than he is a killer, he leans over and he vomits onto Nicky’s shoes. “Sorry, man.”

Nicky is still clutching the knife he’d been trying to wrest away from Nathan in the struggle, and there’s still twin rivulets of blood on his arm from where he’d nearly failed. “Totally chill, dude,” his voice, and his skin, are blanched pale.

There’s a pre-Columbian Adena axe, rough-hewn copper and sharp with age, buried in the back of Nathan’s skull; as he glances at it, it sinks deeper into the wreck of bone and brain matter with a distracting sort of noise, and he thinks he might vomit again. Nicky definitely does. From their side, voice mild and hand pressed tightly into a glancing knife wound to her shoulder, Renee sighs heavily. “That was a priceless historical artifact, Neil.” She sounds irrevocably disappointed in him, and then she calmly phones the police.

* * *

The rest of the evening is a nightmare of hospitals and police stations, but ultimately both Andrew and Neil are released from their respective rooms before too long; the doctors warned that the wound was going to scar, and quite prominently, since Aaron was neither a plastic surgeon or a surgeon of any kind, but deemed his work good enough to send Andrew home with nothing but some painkillers and a triple round of antibiotics to stave off whatever might have been on the knife. Neil’s freedom is a little bit longer in coming, but it helps his case quite a bit that the authorities hadn’t even realized Nathan had escaped before Neil stopped him in what was unanimously ruled an act of self-defense. They tell him he will need to return at some future date for a trial, as a formality, but don’t expect any sort of charges to ever be filed; it’s an embarrassment, on their part, given that it would have taken at least a day for Nathan to arrive in Palmetto on foot.

Afterwards, they return to the House. Whatever plans they might have had for going after Riko in the morning are instantly forgotten – they’re exhausted, sure, but they’re also convinced that if they give him the night, they won’t survive it.

“So,” Matt calls over his shoulder as he brews a pot of coffee from the ancient, makes-everything-taste-like-burnt-breadcrumbs in the downstairs lounge of the House – they haven’t bothered cleaning the bathroom, or even considered whose job it is to restock the amounts of food and drink they’ve consumed from areas they might not even be allowed. Not only does there not actually seem to be a staff (there was a smiling older woman who rented the rooms to them, or maybe the entire building. None of them had checked.), but they already figure they’re going to be paying a hefty amount of fees for damages accrued to the entire town at this point, what’s one more bathroom? “We’re doing this now then?”

He doesn’t look at Dan or Kevin, who were so frequently the leaders in their youth – it doesn’t seem strange, with the hindsight of remembering, the way they’ve grown into the positions they have. Even as children there was always something about them, their personalities, that inspired loyalty and confidence in those around them. Instead, he looks at Renee. Renee has always been the quietest of their group, their silent support system. Not a follower, not truly, but a guardian. A guide. Mothering them in the way of an older sister who knows no other way, but has no other sibling left. It all started with Renee, with her choosing to face the darkness head on and them standing beside her like there was no other choice to be made. It started with her and now, all these years later, it ends with her too.

Renee has the bulk of a bandage beneath her right sleeve and a bruise across one cheek. She stands with the bookends of Nicky, butterfly strips and bandages down one arm, and Andrew, cheek carefully covered with gauze and tape; none of the nine of them look like they have slept in days. “Yeah,” she doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah, we’re doing this now.”

The last time she’d told them of her plans, their only reactions had been reluctance; they were children then, angry at each other because it was far easier than being angry at the world, fighting because it was easier than being afraid. It was only Seth – Seth who was never quite any of theirs so much as he was _all_ of theirs, a boy who didn’t exist outside of the world that these fellow outcasts had built for him – who had immediately agreed to go with her. Seth who was gone now, lost to them as much as he must have been lost to himself the moment they forgot him; Seth who must have died the moment the only people who ever really cared that he had lived were forced to stop, and whose body had finally caught up with the idea when they remembered. Seth who was still with them, in spirit. In memories.

Allison grins and drawls out the familiar words that had convinced them the last time, the syrup-thick accent that had been flattened by so many years spent in the faster paces of Los Angeles emerging unconsciously. “Let’s kill this fucking clown.”


	3. Chapter 3

Twenty-seven years ago they stood in this very spot, on the ragged and overgrown garden of a long-abandoned house on the easternmost border of town.

The house looks no different. Time had not been kind to it any more than the evil living beneath had been; the wood is rotting and the structure sagging and the entire property looks – and smells – like the mushrooms of the forest or the thick, loamy decayed leaf smell of clogged gutters and streetside drains. The grass of the lawn is long dead, and the garden is nothing but a forest of spindly dried sticks and barren spiderwebs, like not even the pests can endure here. There’s something eternal about this house, forgotten in the way of the old civilizations whose ruins survive centuries beyond any record of the peoples who built them.

Forgotten, except by those who remember.

“Well,” Dan drawls, lingering in the bare spaces of the paving stones between the road and the porch, the no man’s land of the only part of Riko’s territory they’re guaranteed to escape from. “Here we are. Again.”

Last time, when they had been children and Riko had been gorged fat and lazy on the numerous victims he had consumed, they had nearly died here. Now they are adults, grown languid and lazy on a normal life, and Riko is a starving, cornered beast who knows they are coming and welcomes it, _burns_ for the chance to finish what he nearly had all those years before. They’re going to die here, Neil realizes suddenly. He’s known it from the very moment he answered the call from an unknown caller, maybe even longer than that – he’s known it since the last time he was in this house, since he woke up in the dark bowels of it, since he looked into the Deadlights and the Deadlights looked _back._

“Most people go their entire lives never having to fight their way through a haunted house so they can kill an alien demon clown,” Aaron comments calmly, mildly; his hands are shaking and his lips are white around the edges, belying the way he feels neither. “How come we’re doing it for the second time?”

Nicky shares the same sort of understated terror in his expression, eyes trained grimly on the front door. “We’re just lucky, I guess,” he drawls, and then he leans over and retches bile into the dead bushes beside the walkway.

“We’re cursed,” Matt amends, and rests a large hand at the curve of Nicky’s spine; he waits until the heaving has stopped, and then he offers a crumpled napkin that looks suspiciously like one from breakfast from his pocket, which Nicky accepts without considering too strongly.

“No,” Andrew shoulders past both of them, marching up to the front porch with vindictive determination, “we’re just dumb as fuck.” At the bottom of the steps, or what passes for them – the wood is rotted out and missing in places, the only thing remaining over the years the skeletal boards of the frame and the exposed nails that twist to the sky like fingernails – he pauses, and then like a striking snake he darts an arm out into the dry brush of the overgrown, long dead hedges and emerges with a piece of wrought-iron fencing.

( _The floor collapsed beneath them, sent them tumbling into the tomb of a kitchen below – the entire room was the color of dust, or was just covered in it, greyscale and molding, and they landed in a pile on the tiles in front of the sink. The screaming was coming from their left._

_Curled into a ball against the mid-century fridge that lurked like a coffin on the darkest wall, Kevin let out a strangled sound of panic and pain; his arm was clutched to his chest, wrist curved upward unnaturally, hand already purple and black from the bruising, and he wasn’t looking at them. He wasn’t looking anywhere, actually – he was curled into a ball, as small as he could get, and his eyes were squeezed painfully shut._

_And then, in the split second of a lull between Kevin screaming and Allison crying and Andrew cursing, they heard the singing._

_Soft singing, words unintelligible, that was coming from fuck knew where, and in the split second of clarity where fight or flight met, in the space of the heartbeat between realizing they were about to die and adrenaline taking charge to try and prevent it, they acted. Dan rushed to Kevin’s side and took his face in one hand and his broken arm in the other, and she forced his eyes open by squeezing both – “Look at me Kev, Kev you need to look at me, we have to, Kev, I have to—” and then she switched both hands to his arm and she **pulled** and—_

_And Kevin shrieked, and Dan shushed him, and Allison squeezed Andrew’s hand so painfully tight that neither of them could feel the pain of it anymore, and she checked the corners while Dan checked the doors while Andrew—_

_Andrew checked the ceiling._

_A glimpse of movement amongst the dust as **something** scuttled along the ceiling, wafted between the shadows and the spiderwebs, still singing softly under its breath. The words did not become any clearer as they grew louder, but they did serve to cover the noise it made as it moved, the click click clicking of toenails on tile, and then it leapt from the darkness to smash into the crumbling table in the center of the room._

_It was human, or something close enough to it, or at least they first thought it was – it was painted like a clown, of course, plaster-white skin and rusty-red lips and lines sweeping down across its nose and **eyes** , yellow like mustard, like traffic paint, like— But then it moved and it was anything but, all angles and legs bent backwards, scuttling and spindly like a crab, or a spider, and the clicking sound came from the seven-inch talons that curved from the end of its fingers or toes like scissors. It balanced on them like a ballerina, spine a perfect curve in the opposite direction, something so entirely familiar about the general shape of it but entirely, inherently **wrong** at the same time._

_And then it opened its mouth and suddenly there was no mouth on its face, no **face** on its face, nothing but a wide, circular hole with concentric rows of teeth, all the way down, all of them churning and swirling in opposing directions—_

_And then suddenly it wasn’t singing anymore, it was **screaming**._

_“Holy fucking Jesus **shit** ,” Neil screeched as he skidded around the flailing, scrabbling legs of the creature and nearly into his friends, barreling into Andrew’s side in the way they were all growing used to, the way his legs had grown too long for the rest of him to manage. There was a streak of rust on his hand from the iron fence post that was struck through the middle of the curling black hole mouth, bloody point caught among the grinding rows of teeth as the other end, they could only guess, was struck in somewhere in the back of the skull. “What the **fuck** is that, holy **shit** Drew, that thing is—”_

_“Kevin broke his arm,” he said on reflex, because he would want to know if it were Aaron, but then, “Did you just stab a clown?”_

_The creature that was maybe a clown, maybe a spider, maybe the demon that had been haunting their entire lives (if not their entire town) gave a final scream of anger, of pain, and then it scurried back wherever it had come from. Neil shrugged. “I mean yeah, a little bit. Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.”_

_Andrew allowed himself to be manhandled in the direction of the door, dragging Allison behind him, but dug his feet in at the threshold. “You stabbed a – How the fuck did you know that would work?” He gestured behind him, then at his face, a sort of wordless acknowledgement of the **thing** that had been there. “How did you know that would stop him?”_

_“I don’t know,” Neil shrugged, cagey, and released his grip on Andrew’s wrist to turn his attention to Dan and Kevin; they followed closely behind, Kevin mobile now but pale, paler than he should be, and his wrist was swollen now to nearly three times its usual size. “I just... decided? Like in Peter Pan.”_

_Adrenaline fled Andrew’s body in a short, sharp cackle that left him small and slow, pliable against Allison tugging at his hand. “We did **not** watch the same movie.”_

_“Isn’t that like... the rule of magic? How they fly? Like... they just decide and they believe really hard?” Fidgeting fingers moved from Kevin’s wrist back to Andrew’s back to Neil’s own, tugging on the sleeve of his shirt. “I don’t know, I just said to myself ‘this is it, this is gonna get the bastard’ and I just... decided.”_

_“Rule of magic,” Andrew agreed calmly, like that meant **anything** – but maybe, with all they had seen, it meant everything. “Good plan, Abram.”)_

The three-foot length of wrought iron fencing looks heavy in his hand, like a weapon; once upon a time, it was. “Rules of magic,” he gestures with it, point first, in Neil’s direction, and he grins a jagged, shark-like grin – the tip is still black with old blood and older memories, and it leaves a smudge in the center of Neil’s shirt when Andrew taps him there impatiently. “We’re gonna _Peter Pan_ this bitch.”

Kevin blanched. “What the **fuck** version of _Peter Pan_ have you been watching?”

* * *

They don’t split up, not this time.

Or, rather, they don’t _intend_ to.

They enter the house as a singular unit, tight formation like a Roman phalanx brought only from terror, not from anything like a plan; maybe it’s the memories that haunt this place as easily as the demon beneath, but they fall almost unconsciously into the same groupings as last time. Renee leads them, as she did before, but this time instead of Seth standing like a soldier at her back it’s the empty space of his memory filled by the eight of them left behind. Allison clutches Andrew’s hand and then, when he snarls at her, his elbow, making sure to stick to his non-dominant side. Both of them lengthen their stride just enough to catch up to Neil, as Matt shortens his to do the same. Dan catches Kevin’s hand, the one that had been broken and reset by inexperienced efforts, the one that still hurts when it rains or, unfailingly, after every playoff game they’ve ever played, and tangles their fingers together – he grins down at her, surprised, and squeezes her grip in return. Aaron and Nicky bring up the rear; Matt might have always been the one who kept an eye on their group before trouble found them but Aaron had known from the time he was seven that he wanted to be a doctor, and he was always the one who looked out for them after.

It never occurred to them, twenty-seven years ago, to wonder who the house had originally belonged to. The important part had been who it belonged to now, or didn’t, and they had accepted the strange assortment of furniture and items at face value. Now, guided by the hindsight of time and the experience of age, they freeze when the door shuts behind them and they’re left with an elaborate set of staircases before them, the kitchen – that none of them want to go _near_ – to their right and the sitting room – dominated still as it had been by the coffin placed on a stand in the center of the room – to the left. “The coffin is a nice touch,” Nicky drawls. Last time, when they had gone to investigate it, they had been faced with an illusion of Neil’s rotting corpse laid out like a funeral. “But I say we just skip this part of it.”

“The fastest way to the basement is through the kitchen,” Renee reminds them calmly, placidly; there’s something steady about her today, something grounded, like whatever she’s lived since they left Palmetto behind and almost lost it forever has finally ended. Or, rather, that regardless of what happens, she’s made her peace with it ending tonight. “We’re going to have to go in there.” It’s far too late to refuse. They’re already in the house, they’re still in the town, in the _state_ – in for a penny, and they’ve come this far.

They’ll have to come farther, it seems, when they turn to the kitchen and see the infinite canyon of darkness that has broken through the floorboards, that disintegrates wider and wider like a toothy grin in the earth, like a crooked maw that cracks open and threatens to swallow them whole. And then, as the crack turns into a canyon turns into a laughing, gaping mouth that splits open like a smile when it notices them, the corners shooting out across the floor and tearing the house – and their group, right down the middle – in two, they run.

Neil stumbles for the stairs, an awkward jump across one of the narrower parts of the hole that opens beneath them, impossibly deep, landing him a third of the way to the landing. He feels a person too-close behind him and reaches back blindly, grabbing a hand that is mostly familiar except for the lack of a scar across the back of it from a hilariously one-in-a-million-odds accident from their sophomore year; Aaron then, not Andrew, but he drags him along after him anyway. “I’ve got Nicky,” Aaron calls as they clamor in a mess of panicked limbs to the second floor.

“I’ve got Matt,” Nicky yells from the landing.

There’s no further sounding off from there, no further noise at all, in fact, until the crumbling and cracking of wood has Nicky and Matt yelping their surprise as the landing starts to separate from the wall. It’s another frantic, desperate scuttle before all four of them collapse in a heap at the top; their legs hang over the edge of the sudden cliff that’s been formed beneath them, the stairs rotting and falling into the impossible chasm that’s opened in the entryway, the abyss that descends too far into the earth to be real – but that they know, somehow, is anyway. And then—

“We’re in the old dining room!” a voice calls from somewhere distant, but beneath them; Neil knows it’s Dan because he recognizes the sharp holler from when he’s played her team, and he used to think it was just the tone of authority that had him turning every time to seek it out – now he knows better, knows it’s the habit of a lifetime to look for her at his side or Kevin’s side. “There’s five of us!”

“Four of us upstairs!” Matt yells back, because he’s probably the loudest of them. They’re not together, which is a fear he can’t yet put words to – they’ve been separated every time they’ve faced this thing and every time they’ve nearly died, and somehow this time feels different in a way that is much larger. He doesn’t know if the different is good or bad, just that there’s a weight in the air that has never been there before and it presses down harder and harder every second they’re not all in sight – but at least they’re all accounted for. “Meet in the kitchen?”

Neither group is on the right side of the house for an easy path – the chasm separated more than just their numbers, it seems, but there’s a balcony off the farthest bedroom with a staircase to the backyard, and through the dining room is the parlor is the pantry is the kitchen, so there are longer routes to be taken. It just means more time in this house, where the demon lurks in every shadow, manipulating them and the world they fight through. “Keep in touch?” Dan yells back, but then there’s a silence that Neil figures must be her, or someone with her, realizing what he’s only just found out – there’s no service on any of their phones, and when he glances at the watch on his wrist he sees the second hand wavering back and forth, caught between two numbers. “Be safe,” she yells instead.

Matt helps them all to their feet, whether or not they need it, and sets off slowly and tentatively down the hallway toward the largest bedroom suite at the back of the house; Nicky is a burr at his back, one finger linked through the belt loop of Matt’s jeans. Bringing up the rear, as he always does – where he can watch their backs and watch them, can plan for the best way to keep them safe – comes Aaron, but he grabs Neil’s sleeve to tug him alongside. “If anything happens to you,” he says reluctantly. Regretfully. Neil and Aaron have never been particularly close but have always been in close proximity, and it’s only the hindsight of adulthood that has them reflecting on the fact that maybe, just maybe, they’d been friends outside of their sharing of Andrew. “My brother would _kill_ me.”

Neil offers a small grin in return. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

Up ahead of them, at the entrance of the bedroom they need to pass through to make it outside, Matt and Nicky are frozen in whispered conversation. “It’s gotta be a trap,” Nicky is hissing, and Matt is nodding his head in agreement even as he vocalizes the opposite.

“It totally is but I feel like he knows we would think that and like, flip it? A double trap.”

“A double trap? Matty, what the fuck—”

“Well it’s not like we’re going on _logic_ here—”

In front of them are two identical doors, both seeming to lead to the bedroom beyond, and both bearing a message written in what appears to be blood: **WRONG WAY** , says the left door. **RIGHT WAY** , says the right. Just the sight of it lets Neil understand exactly what Matt means when he calls it a double trap – it’s so obvious that the right way is the door they should take that he has no doubts that it has instead managed to become, in compensation, the harder of the two paths. But then, instead maybe— “Triple trap?” Aaron asks, finishing what Neil had been just starting to think.

“I fucking hate this fucking clown,” Neil snarls instead, and reaches out to violently twist one of the doors open.

* * *

They spend a good minute or so examining the rift in the world that has opened across the entryway of an otherwise normal West Virginian home; Kevin kicks a piece of detritus from the fallen staircase just to gauge how far down it goes, but then gently nudges Dan further back when the board disappears from sight and sound without ever seeming to hit the bottom. “You know,” he tells her seriously, “we could still leave. Sure, we’d be struck by lightning or a bus or something in a year. But we wouldn’t have to do _this_.”

She seriously looks like she’s considering it. “If I just stand here the earth might literally open up and drop me into hell and personally? I would be okay with that.”

In their youth, the two of them were a team – Kevin had wanted to go pro as soon as he’d been allowed to start playing, long before he’d known Kayleigh was his mother, and Dan had been the only one to match his passion for the sport. She’d been his reluctant practice partner, a strong dealer but she never seemed to enjoy it, not nearly as much as she did critiquing his form. Kevin had never taken criticism well, but he did when it was Dan – because, to his surprise, she was always right. Kevin might have wanted to be a professional exy player from the moment he first stepped onto a court, but Dan had always wanted to be a professional coach. “I didn’t used to be this good at giving up,” he tells her with an empty smile, a parrot of an expression that he just can’t find here in the dark. It’s been harder and harder, in the time since they’d all been given back the parts of themselves they’d forgotten they were missing, to find pieces of himself that he recognizes.

Dan squeezes his hand. “You’ve never known how to give up,” she reminds him. Promises him. She used to say similar things when they were younger, when she was his friend trying very hard to be his coach. “Step it the fuck up, Day.”

They meet up with Renee, Allison, and Andrew in the parlour, where the three are locked into a terse, silent argument in front of the swinging door to the pantry; Allison is still clinging to Andrew’s arm, and most of the disagreement seems to be between her and Renee. “I’m not going in there,” she snarls, and digs her fingers more tightly into the skin of Andrew’s elbow – to his credit, he doesn’t react. There’s a quietness about him now that they usually only see before he shuts down entirely, and while Kevin can understand the sentiment all too well it’s the worst possible time for it.

“Allison,” Renee’s voice is steady as it always is, even with everything they’re facing, but there are lines around her eyes that weren’t there when they first reunited; it’s too easy to forget, the way they’ve all picked up where they left off, that Renee hasn’t lost anything over the years, and in doing so had lost maybe the most of all. “We have to.”

“I don’t care,” she snarls again, or maybe sobs. “I don’t care, I’m not going, just leave me here. I’m out.”

Andrew meets Kevin’s questioning glance over the back of Allison’s shoulders and jerks his chin toward the dirty, off-white wood of the door. “She says she saw something,” and the door is solid still, not rotted to holes and ruin like many of the walls, but there’s a light streaming out from beneath it. “A shadow, something moving.”

At this point, any of them would be more surprised to learn they were _alone_ in the house than to actually come across someone – or some _thing_. Dan squeezes Kevin’s hand another time before reaching out to run the opposite one down Allison’s forearm. “Al, hey... The thing you saw, did it look big? Like last time?”

Last time had been a spider-creature larger than a horse. Last time had almost, _almost_ , left them without the ability for a next time.

The hand that is wrapped around Andrew’s arm and nearly, at the fingertips, buried into his skin tightens at the memory; there’s a flinch from Andrew, which is good only because it means he is mentally present again. “No,” she finally admits, and loosens her grip. “No, it was like... I don’t know, maybe the size of a dog?” She glances at the door again, at the strip of light beneath it. “Small to medium dog, not like Beethoven.” There’s five of them; they can take something the size of a small to medium dog.

Except, when they kick open the door, it’s not a small to medium sized dog.

Instead, the thing that comes hurtling across the tiles at them is a spider creature, much like last time, only instead of brushing the ceiling it reaches only the level of their knees or thighs. And, instead of having the screeching meat grinder head of the demonic clown, it has the glassy-eyed, putrid-rotten head of Seth that starts sobbing as it bears down on them.

* * *

The door Neil wrenches open is neither of the two to the large back bedroom, and instead leads to the smaller bathroom just outside it. The place is filthy, dilapidated in a way far beyond only that of an abandoned house, and none of them want to hazard a guess as to the origins of the stains that streak the walls and floor. It also, they learn when the door slams open and the full force of it hits them, reeks to high heaven of mold and waste and _filth_ , and Nicky almost throws up when he opens his mouth to complain about it. “What the _fuck_ ,” he manages around a short bout of dry-heaving, and Matt slaps a hand over his own mouth to keep from joining.

Aaron, used to children and hospitals and the various odors that come with each, only turns a bland stare in Neil’s direction that would look far more in place coming from his brother. “What an incredible smell you’ve discovered,” he deadpans, and Neil wants to laugh.

“Shut up, Aaron,” but he smiles when he says it. “You don’t get to quote _Star Wars_ at me.”

He shrugs like it doesn’t much bother him one way or the other, and gestures for Neil to go first. “If we let that opportunity pass us by, Andrew would kill us both.” It’s probably true. _Star Wars_ had always been one of Andrew’s favorite movies (But not his most favorite; that was reserved for _The Lord of the Rings_ , which hadn’t even _been_ a live-action movie when they were young but Neil knew without question as soon as he remembered them all that Andrew would have watched every installment a hundred times if he ever had the time for it.) and he would most definitely have made the reference if he were in their group.

Neil sighs. “I know,” he agrees, which results in a visceral, recoiling reaction from Aaron.

“You don’t get to quote _Star Wars_ at me either.”

He smiles, a little bit, and Neil returns it – faintly, both of them, because this is a house that doesn’t welcome smiling. “Anyway,” he finally shakes himself into remembering why they’re here – not the demon. It’s impossible to forget that, why they’re here in this house, in this _town_. Instead, Neil shakes himself away from _Star_ _Wars_ or smiling to remember why the four of them are _here_ , in this bathroom. “Both of those doors were so obviously traps, we couldn’t go through either one.”

Matt gags again into his hand and then casts a disapproving glance around their surroundings. “So we went into the bathroom?”

“You know what white moms on Facebook say,” Neil shrugs, and starts opening the drawers and the cabinets for anything sharp enough to dig into the rotting paint and wood that has the window stuck firmly into its warped frame. “When god closes the door, he opens a window.”

“You’re saying Riko is god?” Nicky moves his hand away to reveal his confusion.

Aaron wrinkles his nose. “You’re going to jump out a window?”

He finds a rusty set of nail clippers in the back of a vanity drawer, and brandishes them in victory. “We,” he slides the file out and stabs it into the wood of the window frame; it goes it far more easily than he was expecting, the wood giving way into fungus and sawdust, and he manages to dig the stuck lock out of the frame in just a few sharp motions. “Are going to jump out a window.”

* * *

Allison lets of a sudden, barking cough of pain and immediately bursts into tears; the snivelling creature that wears Seth’s face like a mask recoils from her, sharp spider legs clicking on the tiles of the floor. “I’m sorry,” he even sounds like Seth, or like Seth used to – there’s a youthfulness to his voice that couldn’t have been there at forty, but definitely had been at eighteen. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He doesn’t seem to be sorry for anything in particular; there’s a milky film of death over his eyes, leaving them cloudy and vacant, and for all that he reacts to their movements – Allison staggers away as Kevin’s instinct brings him closer, inserting himself between the two – his gaze never focuses on any of them. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he repeats, parroting the words faster and faster.

“What the fuck,” Dan snarls, and wraps an arm around Allison’s shaking shoulders. At her other side, a stone-faced Andrew squeezes the hand that’s now digging bloody crescents into his arm and pushes Allison just another step further behind him.

Renee makes a gutted noise in the back of her throat and struggles to find any words. “It’s not real,” she finally whispers, eyes squinted tightly shut. “It’s not real.”

The creature that is not Seth but plays to his memory far too well scuttles a rapid dance across the floor in front of them. “I’m sorry,” it sobs and sniffles and heaves, clawed feet tap-tap-tapping. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m _sorry_.” The faster the words come the more pathetic it is, deep gulps of sobs and thick globs of bile and snot bubbling from the nose and mouth; the tears that leak from its eyes are the same rancid grey of the skin, of the sightless pupils, of the musty floor.

It skids into the cupboards, slipping in a puddle of it’s own leaking mess, and something in Allison breaks.

“Shut the fuck up,” she screams, tearing herself free from Andrew and Dan and around Kevin in a blink, “Shut the _fuck up_ you fucking piece of shit clown! You don’t get to do this, you don’t get to use him like this!” The quivering, hiccoughing creature shakes against the door of the cupboard, cornered, and lets loose a new litany of apologies.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!”

“Yeah,” Allison agrees, swinging the fence post she’d wrenched from Andrew’s grasp like a minor league baseball star – Allison has spent the last twenty years making a name for herself in the world of high fashion, and in the most recent news cycle has been cited as dressing at least two separate people for the Academy Awards. Before that, she was on their high school exy team with Neil and Kevin. She’d been a dealer. “You’re gonna be.”

The sound the fence post makes as it collides solidly with the creature’s skull is drowned out by the sound of the first of the falling bodies landing heavily on the lawn outside the broken window to their left.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Dan recoils in surprise, yelping the not-quite-a-question around the noises of shock that Renee and Kevin also let out, and then again when she goes to the window to lean partly out. “What the fuck?”

Neil groans quietly and rubs his lower back, body sprawled messily in a tangle with Matt’s and Aaron’s; there’s at least twenty years of dead leaves piled up beneath them, and while it’s hardly a soft landing it’s far softer than nothing at all. “Neil threw me out the bathroom window,” Aaron explains, calmly, and makes no move to remove his shoulder from where it is jutting rather heavily into Matt’s ribs. He does, however, move his arm until he finds any part of Neil’s body, thumping a punch into what ends up being his stomach. Nicky, easily on his feet and looking completely unperturbed by their descent, leans down to begin helping the three of them up.

“Don’t worry, Andrew,” he says around a grin that turns smug when Matt groans at the motion of rising to his feet. The others might have been spread across various sports teams in high school, but Nicky had been on the varsity cheerleading squad for three years and had taken an additional four years of gymnastics training before that. “I got video.”

He exhales a loud, frustrated sound through his nose, like he can’t decide if he’s worried about his brother or pleased at the chance to watch him fall from a second story window; instead, he doesn’t do much of anything at all. There’s still the quiet emptiness in his expression, but it’s slowly brightening. “Meet you in the kitchen,” he growls instead, and he reaches out to take Allison’s hand. She takes it gladly, the wrought iron weapon held loosely in the other, and they step over the remains of the creature that had tried to torture them with Seth’s face.

It turns out that they don’t need to let the others into the house. The door to the backyard has rotted entirely off its hinges, likely helped along by the way they burst through it like a flood the last time they’d been in the house. Matt steps through the sagging frame with a collage of leaves still in his hair, and it draws a small smile from Dan before she beckons for him to crouch down enough to remove them. “So,” his voice is grave around the crooked grin he shoots her when she finishes, the one that makes him look sixteen years old again and suffering through a first love that never quite faded, but also never quite came to be. “To the basement, then?”

* * *

The basement has the tunnel that leads to the sewers. The sewers lead to the cave with the old well.

Beneath that, deep in the bowels of the bedrock beneath their town, is Riko’s lair.

They’re barely a few steps into the slogging, waist-deep water of the old sewer tunnels before Allison takes a well-executed leap against Kevin’s back, and he catches her instinctively. She’s a fair bit larger than Amalia is, but it’s second nature the way he wraps his arms immediately underneath her and hoists her onto his back. “I hate you for this,” he tells her, but allows her the piggyback ride through the stagnant water. Nicky offers a similar gesture to Renee, who smiles at him fondly and pats him cheek before turning him down, and then Aaron, who accepts with a wry grin.

It’s not actually as awful as it could be.

The city above them couldn’t afford to replace the cement sewer tunnels, the ones they hike through now, back in the 50s when they did as much of the modernization as they wanted to – instead it had somehow been cheaper to just build an entirely new sewer line, one that didn’t require the same levels of maintenance over the years, and so the water they slog through has, thankfully, not been used to transport human waste for at least sixty years. It is, however, as rancid as the house above them, slick with oils and greases and grey with refuse. Andrew catches up to Neil’s side, arms bent at the elbows to keep his hands above water, and raises a single eyebrow. “You threw my brother out a window?”

“He jumped,” Neil grins, a sharp, shark-like grin that means he’s lying. “You know, in the spirit of Peter Panning this mission.”

Andrew _hmms_ his noncommittal acknowledgement that he doesn’t believe a word Neil has just said, and raises his hands a bit higher. The turnoff for the cave come right at the main junction of the tunnels, where the water is just a bit deeper as the three separate currents vortex together. “I don’t think Peter Pan even uses magic.”

“Well gee, Drew, I don’t exactly know any wizards I can name drop.” Neil sounds irritated, voice as sharp and jagged as his smile, but he also reaches out an elbow to offer Andrew support as he climbs into the tunnel that will lead to the cave, and takes the hand Andrew offers in return.

They’re trailing behind the others now, mostly because Neil doesn’t know the way – he’s the only one of them who hadn’t fought his way down here as a child, who isn’t following some invisible path marked only by fear and panic and memories too-long buried. Instead, he’s following Andrew. “Harry Potter.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“What? Really?” They collide when Andrew all but stumbles to a stop, turning too-quickly in the narrow space of the bottleneck before the cave. He doesn’t say anything else, just stares at Neil like he had back at the restaurant, like he’s seeing a friend for the first time in years and realizing that they wear the face of a stranger. “Where the fuck have you been for the last twenty years?”

Neil grins his same sharp, jagged grin, and shrugs. “California,” he reminds him even though he knows that Andrew _knows_ , knows that Andrew probably has the address of his house and the license plate of his car and probably even which coffeeshop he frequents most. Andrew returns the grin with a flat, unimpressed look, and shoves Neil through the opening ahead of them.

* * *

The cave beneath the house is dark and damp like they remember, something that smells a little bit like the dirt after the rain and a lot like the turned earth of a freshly dug grave, a lot like the musty sour sweet of mildew and memories and _rot_. It’s grey all over, above and around and below, the color of the rock its been roughly hewn into and the stagnant water that slicks the floors, and the color of the old stones that make up the remains of the well that sits square in the center, crumbling slowly.

Down that well, down the dark rabbit hole of moss and old stones and a drop that should logically kill them, had logic any place down here, is the demon’s lair.

“You guys actually climbed down this thing?” Neil asks, leaning over the knee-high remains of the well’s structure; he hadn’t been with them, last time, when they made their way through the tunnels. He’d already been at the bottom. “Like, for real?” One of the stones loosens as he brushes against it, not even resting any weight against it, and it tumbles down down _down_ into the dark where it disappears from sight and sound and he doesn’t hear it strike anything at all along the way. “Damn, and I thought _I_ was the stupid one.”

Kevin and Andrew and Allison and Dan all speak in unison, unplanned but overlapping. “You _are_ ,” and then they exchange glances and shrugs for all having the exact same reaction; they might not have seen each other in twenty years, but they’ve also known each other since they were five (six, in Allison’s case, though it hardly matters at this point. Everything they went through together as teens brought them far closer than kindergarten would have).

“Fuck you very much,” he grins at them, sharp and familiar, but then shrinks; the air down here smells like it had that night, musty and cold. He can taste it in the back of his mouth like bile, feel the ache in his skin and his bones where the scars never quite healed properly, and he might die this time but he’s not going to die _right now_. “So what’s the plan?”

Renee _hmms_ a sympathetic noise and touches his arm, his shoulder, before answering. “We have to climb down into the tunnels,” she tells him, though the others lean close to hear as well. Just because they’ve been here before doesn’t mean they know any more what they’re doing than they had last time. “And into his lair. Once we’re there, once we’re in the heart of his domain, we perform the ritual.”

They might have found their tokens and brought them this far, but none of them are quite sure what this ritual Renee has discovered fully entails. “Can’t we just,” Nicky waves his hands through the air a little bit like a magic wand and a whole lot like a bad dance choreography, “hold hands and _Expecto Patronum_ this musty bitch back to hell?”

Andrew glances down at sleeves that are woefully free of hidden blades and have been for years, and clenches his fists instead. “Jesus Christ. It is with all the confidence of the last twenty years that I say my life would be unquestionably better if I had never met any of you.”

“Yeah,” Neil agrees. “ _Expecto Patronum_ is for Dementors. Riko is clearly a Boggart, we need to hold hands and _Riddikulus_ his ass.”

Woefully free of knives, and of any memory of ever tracing the scars that loop Neil’s skin. “I take it back, Neil can stay. The rest of you are on thin fucking ice.” It’s a strange feeling, not remembering, when Andrew has always been someone who remembered _everything_ – one last injury from the last twenty years. And then he does. “Fuck you, Neil, we literally read the first book together.”

Neil grins.

* * *

The cavern beneath the well is massive, a coliseum carved out of stone and time that reaches all the way up to a narrow pinprick of sky, tall as a skyscraper, far taller than should be possible – Neil knows, objectively, that there’s nothing like this beneath the town. The roads would have collapsed, the buildings would have collapsed off their foundations, the river would have rushed in to reclaim it... and yet, here they are. The cavern spans the length and width of three exy courts, broken up only by the massive pile of _something_ in the middle. It’s like a crystal formation, sharp and jagged, but made of metal – it reaches up toward the tiny speck of sky like a shattered ribcage, and Renee makes her way directly for it.

“Oh my god,” Kevin says under his breath, and Neil knows immediately what he’s going to say. In every hotel room they’ve ever shared during their fifteen years of playing together, it’s always been a constant stream of various History Channel shows. “Neil,” he reaches out, fingers snagging the sleeve of Neil’s shirt, and he tugs gently. “Neil.” There’s a smile curling across his lips like a fox, pointed and sly, and it explodes into something bright and full and _happy_ when he sees exactly how exasperated Neil looks before he’s even finished speaking his thought. “ _Aliens_ ,” he gestures with his hands, and the tight, oppressive feeling of the cave and the impending ritual breaks on Neil’s laugh.

Beside them, Nicky snorts incredulously. “Kevin Day, did you just _meme_ in the death cave?” And then, all of it catching up to him, “No fuckin’ way, Riko is an _alien_ demon clown?”

Ahead of them, nearly among the skeleton of the metal structure that sprouts from the floor like a tumor (or, perhaps more accurately but somehow more impossible to fathom, lies half buried in the dirt where it crashed), Renee and Andrew share a similarly tired look. “So the ritual,” Renee begins, just loud enough to catch in the acoustics of the space, and though her voice never rises above her usual soft, steady almost whisper, it sounds as though she’s everywhere around them at once. They make their way over, drawn by the quiet command in her words, and before they know it they’re in the same circle as they’d been in the woods, as they’d been that day after they didn’t die, as they’d held their bleeding hands together and sworn that one day, _one day_ , they would come together again just like this.

Renee goes first, reluctantly watching the silver chain of her necklace slide through her fingers like water to pool in the base of the vessel she’d carried down in her backpack; she doesn’t speak words, not like they were expecting. The ritual is about loss, and about sacrifice – it is not about ceremony. “After my mother died, I was terrified of the idea that Robin was going to die too,” she tells the necklace, and maybe them. “And then when my father...” Andrew’s hand snaps out almost without his controlling it, taking her hand and squeezing it in his own; Andrew didn’t have a father, but he had had Drake. “I wanted so hard to be the person my sister needed, and in the end I wasn’t, and she died because of it. But... but I’m ready to live with that.”

She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and allows the last of the chain to fall from her grasp.

At her side, Andrew squeezes her hand a second time; the knuckles on his other hand, the one holding a stained rock from the river in his fist, are white. He doesn’t say a single word as he opens his grasp, and the stone makes a hollow sounding _thunk_ as it clatters to the bottom of the vessel that sounds, in that moment, very much like the panicked pounding of a heart.

One by one, some with whispered explanations or even just soft words of goodbyes, they go around the circle and add their tokens to the ever-growing pile of items that sit in the round hollow like a strange collection. Allison, eyes bright, waits for the others to finish before she reaches into the back pocket of her jeans and throws a ten-dollar bill right on top. “Seth’s token,” she explains quietly. “For all those bets I lost over the years.” Cracking smiles as well as their wallets, the others solemnly add eight other crumpled bills to her addition.

“Just as long as he doesn’t use it to hire Neil another stripper,” Kevin jokes, and it diffuses whatever heaviness of the ritual had remained looming over them – the only thing left, Renee had explained to them then, was the fire. _To burn the past along with the present_ , she’d said like she was quoting something, and had slid the half-used container of lighter fluid into the outside pocket of her backpack.

That half-used container is emptied entirely over their assorted tokens, sloshing against the sides of the vessel like a mini storm, and it’s only when there’s not a single drop of sharp-smelling liquid left that she discards the bottle. And then— “Are you fucking serious?” she says, more to herself, but meets their questioning gazes with a strange, solemn expression. “There’s a fucking hole in this pocket. The matches fell out.”

Nicky’s face crumples, and then immediately brightens. “Andrew always has a lighter,” he says excitedly, and turns to him—

And then he remembers.

“I quit smoking back in my 20s,” he reminds his cousin seriously, something that bridges the present and past and the twenty years in between them, but he doesn’t seem overly upset by it. Instead, his mouth quirks into something just this side of a smile, and he reaches over to thwap Neil very roughly in the sternum. It’s second nature, some long-recognized motion from a lifetime ago, the way Andrew then waits patiently with the hand he’d struck with held out expectantly.

Grinning, Neil digs into his jacket and emerges with the old lighter he’d taken from his old bedroom. “You could never keep track of one of these even when you _did_ smoke,” he says fondly, and ignores Andrew completely to reach across and offer it to Renee instead.

Andrew shrugs. “Never needed to, you always had one.”

The tiny, flickering orange glow of the lighter sparks to life in Renee’s cupped hand, weak and fluttering, before roaring like a tiger as it catches the accelerant she’s poured into the vessel. The flames leap immediately three feet into the air, all nine of them stumbling backwards with startled shouts, and then drop to a simmer as the tokens finally catch – they shouldn’t burn. More than half of them are a material that **should not** burn, not with something as simple as this, but they catch and crackle like logs would, like kindling, and as they regain their footing and their eyesight from the sunspots that mark the back of their vision, they do.

Somehow, it only feels natural for them to reach out and link hands as they watch the greedy flames turn their offerings into ash. They stand in a circle around it, just like they had with bleeding hands and bleeding hearts and a vow too big for any of their mouths, and they watch the flames and smoke rise and then fade as, eventually, there is nothing left.

“Is...” Dan doesn’t break their circle, but she does tug a bit to lean over and around, eyes scouring the cavern. It’s quiet, and calm. “Is that it? Is it over?”

The vessel is empty, even of ash. The inside of it is shiny and new.

Renee hasn’t opened her eyes since the fire first lit, and then she does. “I think so,” and even her voice sounds fresh, sounds _new_ , sounds like it isn’t caught in her throat in a lump of thirty-year-old guilt.

And then, from everywhere and nowhere at all, they hear the low chuckle of Riko tumbling like rocks in a landslide. “Oh _children_ ,” he purrs, gloats, crows his victory as the very walls tremble – the flashes of yellow sunspots still dancing around the edges of their vision shimmer again and aren’t spots at all, but _eyes_. Neon yellow, ringed in red, the terrifying familiar eyes that have haunted their nightmares since childhood. “You thought something as simple as facing your insecurities could defeat me? I am the **_Destroyer of Worlds_**!”

And then, as the laughter reaches its crescendo, Riko emerges as a giant scorpion from one of the shadows and brings the glistening barb of his tail, slick with venom and as large as a car, down into their group like a wrecking ball.

* * *

They scatter. They _have_ to.

The barb of the tail comes down with horrifying precision onto the vessel, all that remains of their apparently useless ritual, splitting the wood and leather into neat shards that flutter to the dirt like particles of dust in the air – and then in continues down into the bones of the whatever it is that crashed here, shattering the rock beneath, and the resulting shockwave sends them sprawling in all directions.

Neil comes to his senses, and his feet, in a shallow divot of the cave; it’s a small hollow that looks like it’s been scooped from the earth, and slightly downhill from where he had previously been standing. His lower back and his knees feel every one of his forty years, and Andrew is strewn haphazardly beside him. “I’m too old for this shit,” he groans without opening his eyes, but he clamors to his feet when Neil reaches out to kick at him gently. Above them, over the slight rise in the stone floor, they can hear the sounds of muffled groans, the long-forgotten _click-click-click_ of Riko’s spider-like legs, and then a shout of alarm. “ _God_ ,” he snarls, “I guess we’re doing more running then.”

“You used to be in shape,” Neil beams at him fondly, and reaches out to snag the sleeve of his hoodie and drag him along.

The sleeve tugs out of his grip, indignant. “Fuck you, Neil.”

The scorpion-Riko has Kevin and Allison cornered in some cave beneath one of the long-fallen rocks, a rough lean-to of shelter that is just too small for him to reach into with anything beyond the sharp, glistening tips of his claws, just too small for them to have anywhere to escape. Allison is plastered to the very back wall of it and Kevin is plastered against her chest, pushing her back even further, and both are sporting scratches across their stomachs. “Hey Fuckface!” Dan calls from somewhere on the other side of the cavern – she and Matt rise from a similar hollow as Neil and Andrew, this one on the other side of the craggy splinters that rise from the floor, and Riko whips around to face them. “I kicked your ass when I was thirteen and I can do it again!”

Riko hisses, and snarls, and whirls on her. “I have devoured _centuries_ of your kind,” and he grows in size even as he speaks to her, twice the height and breadth, and his tail is now the size of a small house. It whips into a frenzy over his head, lashing like a caged animal against the improbable open space of the underground lair, and then snaps with precision down at where she and Kevin and frantically rushing for cover. “I have not been defeated yet, and I will not be defeated today.”

The minor earthquake caused by the freight train of a stinger colliding with the rock sends them all to even further corners of the cavern, ears ringing and bones aching.

Neil opens his eyes and can’t see anything, nothing but heavy blackness around him and a muzzy, hollow feeling in his skull that he knows all too well is another concussion; it hits him then, blind and alone beneath the earth, that if he survives this it will only be for his coach to kill him. “Neil,” says a voice somewhere in the darkness that is as familiar to him as his own, and he reaches out blindly in search of Andrew. He knows that he’s lying on his back, knows that the rock around him is bare, until it isn’t – his hand hits something that feels human and indignant, and Andrew says his name again with infinite less worry and infinite more disdain. “Thank you,” he says, flat as the rock Neil is sprawled on, “for smacking me in the face. I would like to remind you that I was _recently stabbed_.”

He moves his hand again, purposefully, and feels a familiar nose against his fingers, and an ear against his palm. “You got stabbed on the other side,” Neil points out, but removes his hand anyway. “Give me a break, I’m blind now.”

A snort of laughter, and then Andrew’s hand is digging through the various pockets on Neil’s person. “It’s dark, you fucking idiot, we’re in a _cave_.” His lighter clicks a few times in the hollow of the darkness, and then there’s a small glow of orange when the flame catches; it reveals Andrew, face thrown in ghoulish shadows, and Neil, who is not blind.

“Right,” he says, cowing under the stare of Andrew telling him, wordlessly, exactly how big of an idiot he thinks he is. They’re in a small cave – or, as their eyes adjust and the scope of their tiny light reaches farther, the opening of yet another tunnel – that, when Neil turns his head a final direction, he assumes is under the main cavern. A slope of loose shale and treacherous gravel leads up to the barest hint of light at an opening, the same vacant blue glow of a television in a dark room. Of the cavern. “I knew that.”

Trying to clamor up the slope in the rock is a terrible idea, they learn. It leaves their palms bloody and their knees cut to ribbons, and for every foot of headway they make they bring another two square feet or so of dirt and rock back down with them. Eventually, they realize that the only way out – if there is one – is deeper through the tunnel.

Somewhere ahead of them is a slow but constant dripping of water that’s as good a destination as any.

Instead, when they breach the first turn of the narrow passage, they run nearly head first into the incongruous sight of identical wooden doors, each one dripping a message in fresh blood. **RIGHT WAY** , reads the left door. **WRONG WAY** , reads the right.

* * *

Dan wakes up in the girl’s locker room of their high school gym.

Or somewhere like it, at least. It has the same haunting pale grey cement walls, tinged green by the always flickering florescent lights overhead, the same sallow, yellowish cast to the rusted metal door to the gym and the rusted metal benches that line the double rows of rusted metal lockers. The entire room has always, and still does, have the relative aura of soured milk – humid and forgotten.

She knows it is not the locker room of their high school gym because she’d been in it less than a day before to retrieve her token, had seen the way the walls had finally been painted a fresh white and the lockers a bright orange, the way the lights were finally working properly and they’d finally installed some form of ventilation to get the damp out, to keep the steady black dots of mold from growing across the corners and edges, and she knows because she is alone.

Dan had always been too good at sports and too bad at making friends to really get along with the girls in her classes – she was short in temper and relatively uncaring in any of their issues, and maybe it was just that she _had_ her friends, the same people she had been with since they were barely out of their toddler years, but she never really made an effort. She had her friends, and everyone else was just... her competition.

And so, as tended to happen in high school gyms, the rumors started.

By the time she was thirteen years old, Dan’s reputation as the town slut had been firmly cemented, despite the fact that the only boys (or girls, for that matter) she ever spent any of her time with were her same group of best friends since childhood. It didn’t help, that she hadn’t bothered to get to know anyone else even partly well enough to have an ally outside her circle. It didn’t help that her mother was the bartender at the trucker’s dive bar off the highway, the one where sometimes the women ended up serving more than just drinks for some extra cash. It didn’t help that her father hadn’t even run off so much as never stayed the night, was so much a non-existence that even her birth certificate said _Unknown_.

It never really bothered her, not really, because she and everyone she cared for knew it was nothing more than a vicious rumor. Until she was here, that is, in the sallow old milk locker room where the whispers caught in the acoustics and she couldn’t ignore them, even if she tried, for the entire ten minutes they were given to change out. Here she was always alone, never in a gym class with Allison or Renee, but always with one of the boys she knew would be waiting just on the other side of that heavy door, in a spotlight of washed out green, on display like an animal at the circus for the crowds of thoughtless young girls to hurl their insults at.

Dan wakes up in the girls locker room of their high school gym, and knows it isn’t real because she is alone.

Matt wakes up in a coffin, buried alive.

* * *

Kevin and Allison are shocked into consciousness by the punch of cold water hitting their bodies like a wall of ice, and when they thrash themselves into awareness it is that that they are sinking. The shivering starburst of surface light above them grows smaller and smaller, the water growing greyer and darker, and it’s not until Allison feels something snag in her hair seconds before she feels silt and mud at her back that she starts to panic.

She flails against the grip in her hair, against the tug of something holding her down, and it’s not until Kevin’s face appears in her narrowing field of vision that she relaxes. He holds up a hand to get her to calm down, and then he dives to the side and she feels the additional pressure of him freeing her hair from whatever has caught it.

Bubbles, and a startled yelp. Kevin recoils with the skeletal arm still in his hand, the tips of its fingers still drawing through her hair like a lover, and she swears to god and herself that if she survives this she’s going to cut it all off – her soon to be ex-husband used to pull her hair that same way, and _never again_.

Tapping his shoulder, and then his elbow, and finally his hand to encourage him to grab hers, Allison shoves off from the slick, sticky bottom of the cave pool and launches for the surface, so far above. Kevin is a weight dragging her down until he is not, kicking in much the same way as her, and it might be a more terrifying ordeal but they’d learned how to swim together the summer before second grade, first in the shallow pool at the community center and later in the river that surrounded their town, fighting currents and submerged plants and sometimes the older kids who thought it would be funny to tug at them from beneath. This, right here, is something they know how to do.

And then, when they break the surface of the water gasping and coughing to the sounds of Renee and Nicky and one of the twins locked in a strange, screaming battle with the shifting form of Riko chasing them in various monstrous forms, they think this is something they know how to do as well.

* * *

Matt forces his body to remain still, to _not_ thrash in the confines of the box he’s in – it’s not a coffin, he finds on further inspection. Too rough-hewn for that, something more like a homemade box of plywood and nails, and it’s not airtight at all. Dirt is already pooled beneath him and more falls along his skin as he counts the seconds along with his breaths until he can slow them, shallow them out. – tightening all of his muscles to fight the instinct to _fight_. Instead, he squeezes his body tight and unmoving like a board, like a stone (like a _corpse_ , he doesn’t think), and he takes as deep a breath as he’ll allow himself in order to call softly, “Dan?”

She’d been with him, when the tremors in the rock threw him away from where he’d been standing. If she’s here now, he needs to find her.

“Dani, are you there?”

 _Are you there?_ She hears the taunting voices of the faceless girls from her past, the hisses of whispered derision that only found bravery here in the stagnant walls of the locker room. They aren’t coming from anywhere, or they’re coming from _everywhere_ , echoing out from the walls like the spores of mold that had fought to conquer the room years before. _Do you take your clothes off like that for the men at your mom’s bar?_ They ask her, and she sees the shadows of mold darken, like tar, thick and dripping, as they start to spread. _Should we be giving you money for this? Quick, Jess, grab a dollar_. _For a dollar she’ll go out there naked_. The words grow louder the more the black tar spreads, and soon the walls and the lockers and the benches are _covered_.

Soon the floor is as well. And then it keeps rising.

“Matt?” She finally calls out, looking around for him – he’d been with her, before she ended up here. If he’s anywhere nearby it’s likely the boy’s locker room on the other side of the wall. He might be able to hear her through the air vent. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Oh fuck,” she hears his voice faintly. Far away. “Oh thank god you’re here.”

His voice isn’t coming through the air vent at the ceiling. If anything, it sounds like it’s coming from the drain in the floor.

“Matty, I’m in the locker room,” she calls out, just on the off chance he’s somewhere similar. In their youth, he was always waiting for her right outside the door.

There’s no response, and she starts to panic a little bit. The sticky, tar-like whatever is up to her knees now, and when she tries to lift her feet to step closer to the exit it’s a battle of strength she has no hope of winning. “Yeah,” he finally responds, “I’m... I’m not.” He sounds even farther away now, like they’re drifting apart even though she hasn’t, _can’t_ , moved, and she tries another sticky, slogging step that has her glued in place as the black substance now breeches her hips. “I’m underground, but not under the house. Like... I’m pretty sure I’m buried in a grave.”

She swallows her own quiet noise of panic when she hears the tremor in his voice. “But you can still hear me, right? So we must be close by... right?”

He laughs, and it makes the cold press of ooze that breaches her ribcage feel just a little bit warmer. “Dani, baby, I have no idea how any of this works. We could be on different fucking planets for all I know.” The quiver is still in his words, but she can tell there’s an effort to sound as normal as he can; at this point she’s fairly certain they’re going to die, but if that is the case she’s glad he’s not alone. That he’s with her. “But yeah, I’m close by. I’m here.”

It’s only the fact that the tar, or whatever it is, is lapping at her chin that she decides on her next words. “You know that I’m like, totally in love with you, right?” His voice, which had sounded at least somewhat close to her falls entirely silent, like he’s gone, and she regrets speaking only because she wasted whatever time left she could have spent hearing him. “And like, yeah, okay, maybe I’m only saying it because we’re about to die, but it’s been true since we were like, _fuck_ , sixteen?” The summer that Allison and Nicky had ended their short-lived, disastrous relationship had been the same summer than Dan had convinced herself, against the background symphony of the girls at school, that things would never work between them. The tar licks at her earlobes, sliding into her nostrils, before she hears Matt again.

“Are you _fucking serious_ ,” he calls up to her. “Okay, new plan. Dan, I’m gonna—” His voice cuts out entirely. She has just enough time to panic before the tar swallows her entirely, suspending her in thick darkness, and she bites her lips bloody and raw convincing them to stay pinched shut; the impulse is to scream, to try and suck in air she knows isn’t there anymore. “I’m gonna climb out of here,” she hears from an unfathomable distance, from somewhere below her, which is impossible because the only thing down there is—

The drain.

She bites her lips harder, and she tries to swim _down_ , deeper into the tar, lets the sucking pull of it take her under entirely. Her feet slide out from beneath her and her arms drag in slow hollows over her head as she falls, so slow, and then she sinks.

And then, when she gets to the bottom, she kicks her legs as best as she can, tiny flutters of movements, and she goes further – down into the very belly of whatever hell she’s caught it. She gets to the bottom of the pit and she reaches her hand out, digs in her fingers, scrapes at the very bottom of wherever she is, and she tries to go deeper.

And then, between one suffocating heartbeat and the next, she feels fingers catch hers, and they _pull_.

She and Matt claw each other out of the hell of their own minds, choking and gagging, on the rocks of the cave beside a pool of tepid water. They’re both filthy, covered in mud and tar and some paste like mixture of the two, and they smell rather heavily of mold and rot. It doesn’t matter. Matt cups her face like it’s the most precious thing he’s ever held, eyes soft and filled with wonder, and Dan can’t take it anymore; she lunges for him, and steals what little breath he has left.

* * *

They stare at the doors with something more like frustration than fear.

“So,” Andrew doesn’t bother to look at Neil when he speaks; instead, he passes his glance between the two messages on the otherwise identical doors, and then he reaches for the knob that’s closet to him. “Count of three?”

Neil laughs – of course it’s Andrew, who gets it so implicitly. The others, before, had tried to solve the riddle of which door would lead them where they wanted to go with the least dangerous route, but Andrew doesn’t even hesitate. He knows immediately, like Neil does, that both options will be equally horrific. “On three or after three?”

The only answer is the sound of Andrew slowly, deliberately, turning the knob of his door. “I literally hate you,” he pauses to give Neil time to adjust, and then, “three.”

Neil opens the door.

“Huh,” comes Andrew’s quiet noise of contemplation, but nothing like the horror they’re probably supposed to be feeling. “I think we got the wrong ones.”

If Aaron’s bloated, rotting corpse hanging from a noose slung over the doorframe is anything to go by, he’s probably right.

“I got Aaron hung from the ceiling,” he tells Andrew with only a small measure of delight – he knows it’s not really Aaron in the way he knows these doors were never meant to stop them so much as simply dishearten them, knows it because they are still alive. “How about you?”

Andrew allows the door to fall all the way open, revealing Kevin’s tortured body slung on a hanging meat hook like a slab of beef; his eyes are wide and open, staring sightlessly, and the prongs of the hook stick out through his mouth like a grotesque parody of a fish on a line. The wood of the door, hilariously, reads **WRONG WAY**. “Kevin in a meat locker.”

It’s another second or two of just standing, staring, before everything comes together.

“Get the rope,” Andrew instructs, already moving through the doorway toward Kevin, “I’ll get the hook. We’ll make a grappling hook to climb up the hill back there.”

It’s probably the best plan Neil’s ever heard in his life. “Do you know,” he keeps up a running stream of conversation, mostly to distract himself from the putrid stench of rotting flesh and the way Aaron’s bloated body seems to press and give just a little too much beneath Neil’s fingers. “How many times in my life I have wanted to solve my problems with a grappling hook?”

A thud of a body hitting the ground behind the wall, and then Andrew appears in his doorway to grin at him. “I actually do,” he reminds him, and takes the end of the rope to start tying them together.

When they get back to the cave they started in, it’s almost too easy – the floor of the cavern above them is rough and craggy, full of edges and crannies for the hook to catch in, and it only takes two throws before the rope holds firm when they both set their weight against it.

Neil clamors up the rise mostly on his hands and knees; he can tell Andrew’s not far behind by the shaking of the rope and the near-constant update of a touch at his ankles that spurs him onward. By the time he crests the rise, Riko has the others mostly cornered – the breath that’s been caught in his lungs since this all started punches out at the sight of Kevin (Kevin, his brother in two lifetimes now, his best friend, who kissed Thea and Amalia goodbye and left with the bare bones of an explanation but promised to be back before too long, who is grossly excited for the new baby, who called Neil _in tears_ when they found out it was a second girl because he was just so _happy_ ) standing valiantly in front of the others, shielding them.

Something in him, likely his common sense, shakes loose from where the rest of him stands frozen; he darts out into the open, pulled as tall as he can manage, and he starts to _laugh_.

“So is this just what you do, you off-brand Scorpion King bitch?” Riko freezes, clawed fingers _snip-snipping_ the empty air above the others, and slowly turns his head. “Is this why you hide in the sewers and drag kids into the shadows? Because if you tried coming for them in the open they’d see how fucking _dumb_ you look? I mean, god damn, you look like a CGI-reject from one of those direct to cable SyFy channel movies.” Riko shimmers, goes strange and staticky in the air for a blink of time, and then he snarls; he’s shrunken down closer to their size now, like maybe he’s finally realized that he’s just too big to get into the many hiding places they’ve found, and he turns his back on Kevin and the others to stalk a few steps closer to Neil. “Something that airs for the first and last time at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday... _Sewer Clown_ , starring every Z-list actor you’ve never heard of. No, wait, I’ve got it,” he’s got Riko’s undivided attention now, a bare ten feet between them, and they’re nearly at eye level – every step closer has brought Riko another head shorter, closer to his prey. “ _Shits and Gigg—_ ”

The air in his lungs turn to ice and the words in his mouth turn to ash, and suddenly he’s back there again – not in the torture, but the aftermath of it, when Riko had leaned in and caught Neil’s gaze and suddenly the piercing yellow of his eyes weren’t eyes at all, when Riko opened his mouth and his entire body wide to the universe and showed Neil what he really was. He still doesn’t know what they are, the Deadlights. The triangle of swirling lights, or stars, that caught him with a cold hand around his throat and another around what could only be his soul, squeezing the life from them both. All he knows is that he caught Riko’s gaze and the gaze caught him back, snared like a rabbit in a trap, and now all he knows is that same trapped, timeless feeling of being frozen in a single second of time, dragged slowly across the broken glass of every potential future Riko can imagine for them.

He’d watched his friends die here, thousands of times, in a thousand different ways. And then, when the second had ended an eternity later, he’d been stuck there every time he’d closed his eyes for the next nine years, and then he’d forgotten _everything_.

The words catch on his tongue and his breath catches on his ribs and his eyes goes glazed and vacant like he’s been knocked out cold, and maybe he has been, and then Riko catches him around the face with one of those scorpion’s claws—

And then he reels backwards, shrieking in pain, the iron fencepost that Andrew must have retrieved from where they’d dropped it for the ritual stabbed through one of his eyes.

The second of time that is everywhere and nowhere at all releases Neil with cold disregard, dropping him the seven feet he’d been lifted to to the rocks of the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. He lands with a heavy noise and, when his brain tries to catch up with a here and now that it’s already seen with a thousand different outcomes, stays down. It’s less than another second before Andrew’s face appears above him. “You come up with that on the spot,” he asks around the lemon-sour pinch of worry that turns his lips pale and thin, “or have you been planning that joke all day?”

Only for the last hour or so, he wants to say, or he doesn’t want to say anything at all. Instead, he grins. “You stabbed a clown through the head for me,” he reaches out to hook his ankle around Andrew’s tugging him off-balance an entire step closer, and his smile cracks wider, like a sunburst—

And then wider still, like a scream, when Riko pulls the sharpened iron rod out in one fluid motion and, face twisted in rage, stabs it just as easily into through Andrew’s body; the crimson floret emerges somewhere just above his belly button.

For the next few seconds, neither of them is quite sure what’s happening. They stare at each other and then at the metal rod with equal parts horror and confusion, and Neil rises to his feet in a shaky, jerky motion that seems to be only for the purpose of examining the tableau closer – he’s impaled all the way through, just under the ribcage to the left of his spine in the back and just to the right of his stomach in the front, with a good foot or so of metal protruding from either end. It’s nearly unbelievable, except—

Except Andrew takes one tiny step and _crumples_ , dropping to the floor with a squelch of blood and a whine of pain that sounds like it’s been wrung out from him against his will, and then he tries to lift his hands to the wound only they don’t seem to be working properly, they shake and they hover and then, with the same heavy noise he’d fallen with, they drop back to his sides to hit the ground.

“Drew?” Neil drops heavily to his knees beside him, not even feeling the way he’s a few years and a few sports injuries too old for the gesture to come easily to him, and hovers his hands in the same sort of uselessness. “Oh shit, oh fuck, oh fuck, Drew, are you—” Andrew’s skin is bone white and the ground beneath him is blood red, and his gaze spins wild and vacant before it catches on Neil’s. “ ** _AARON_** ,” he bellows, and turns his head to try and find him only to realize he’s already there. They all are, somehow, and he hasn’t noticed. “Aaron, you gotta—”

“ _MOVE_!” Aaron is screaming back at him, hands hooked under his twin’s armpits and Nicky’s beneath his knees, the two of them scramble-dragging Andrew painfully back down the loose shale of the ramp they’d only just climbed up. Kevin and Matt manhandle Neil similarly and none too soon, as Riko’s roar echoes right at their heels when they disappear down the slope.

He drops again at Andrew’s side just as the other man gurgles a noise, and then coughs up a handful or two of blood. “Hey, Drew,” his voice sounds like he feels – Small. Confused. Helpless. “Hey, you’re gonna be okay—”

“Neil—”

“Aaron’s a doctor, he’s gonna patch this up.”

He and Aaron have never been each other’s favorite people, but Andrew has always been theirs; he lets go of his brother only long enough to squeeze Neil’s shoulder and, when he doesn’t seem to notice, the back of his neck. “Neil,” his voice is soft in a way it’s never been, not with them. “He doesn’t need a pediatrician. He needs a _miracle_ , and like, at least five surgeons.”

The words don’t quite seem to soak in, but they do spur Neil into action; he squeezes Andrew’s hand one last time and then shoves himself to his feet, all but ignoring the way the others have split into twos and threes to attempt to comfort each other. “Alright,” the rope they’d used before is still in place, and he makes his ways purposefully toward it, “okay. Then let’s kill Riko so we can get the fuck out of here and get Andrew to the hospital.”

Nicky is the next to press gentle pressure to Andrew’s hand, and then follow Neil; his is not the same, confident charge. “I think Aaron is gonna stay,” he tells Neil softly when he catches up, grabbing the rope in front of him so he’s forced to stop for a second. “With Andrew. You know, keep an eye on him.”

The others, one by one, press soft touches and soft words against Andrew before they leave him. It’s only when Renee, the last of them, turns to leave that Andrew tries desperately to sit up. “He gets bigger,” he hisses around the harsh panting of pain and the small bubbles of blood that coat his lips like sea foam, “when he’s threatening you. But he also gets smaller when you’re taunting him.” With great effort, he finds Neil’s eyes from across the cave. “Peter Pan the motherfucker.”

* * *

Neil doesn’t stop, striding across the distance between him and Riko like it suddenly doesn’t matter that the monster has grown to his impossible size again, bigger than the house they might still be under, bigger even than the cavern they’re in should allow. He strides across the space between them, and he lifts his chin, and he _sneers_.

( _“Andrew figured it out,” he whispered to them, still trapped at the base of the slope by Nicky’s desperate grip on the rope. It seemed to be more of something to keep him upright than it was to keep Neil down here with them, and his knuckles were white with the strain of how hard he clung to it. “It’s like how Peter Pan flies, you know? By believing really hard, or whatever. The fencepost works against him because we’ve always believed it would.”_

_Dan looked thoughtful, and then she looked confused. “So, what, we just have to believe we’re winning?”_

_Not quite, but almost. Neil tried to find the words to explain the convoluted way they’ve found this all seemed to work – it doesn’t, not logically, but it **does**. He’s grateful, then, for the way Renee just seems to understand. But then, of course, she’d had more time than any of them to study it all. “When we’re scared,” she didn’t sound scared, not then. She sounded, however, very sad. “And we’re all convinced we’re going to die, he gets bigger. Stronger. But when Dan and Neil stood up to him, he was almost our size. So we just have to—”_

_The grin that lit up Dan’s face momentarily before being swallowed by the endless chasm of grief that her jaw set itself back to was echoed just as briefly on Matt’s face. “Make him believe he’s small enough that we can kick his ass?”_

_“Exactly.”)_

Neil lifts his chin, stares as hard as he can at the curve of Riko’s neck ( _“Don’t look into his eyes,” he hissed the final warning at them as they made their way back up the slope. He didn’t need to explain – they’d all seen what had happened to him the last two times_.), and he sneers. “Peter Pan time, Clown Boy.”

It doesn’t change his size, but it does draw him up short; Riko stands there, looms like a cliff poised to fall, tail lashing, and he blinks. “I don’t know what that means,” and he doesn’t immediately attack, but he coils his body like he’s about to. “But if you’re ready for me to kill more of your friends, I can find the time.”

“It _means_ ,” and there’s something to be said for the way Dan had survived the rough waters of cruel girls in their teen years: by sharpening herself even crueler. She cracks the words like a whip, voice hard and face bored, and she bumps casually against Neil’s shoulder like she hadn’t just sobbed herself hoarse as she said what none of them openly acknowledged was a farewell to one of her best friends. “That we’re going to kick your ass for what you did to our town, and then we’re going to break your neck for what you did to Andrew.”

 _What the fuck_ , comes Kevin’s whisper behind her, but he doesn’t vocalize it loud enough to break the illusion that none of them are out of their minds with terror yet.

Riko looks amused, at first, until he sees the way they aren’t cowering or running for cover anymore. Then he looks absolutely enraged. “You think you can defeat me after failing so many times?” The air around him shimmers again as he shifts form from the scorpion of early to the open-mawed spider beast of their childhood, endless rows of teeth bloody and glistening. His face doesn’t even hinge open anymore so much as open like an envelope, unfolds to reveal the mouth that grows wider and wider, hovering overhead. “I have destroyed _planets_.”

“Yeah,” Dan agrees, and shrugs. “And then you crash landed here and couldn’t leave.”

He roars, and lunges the meat-grinder mouth closer, but his legs suddenly aren’t strong enough to support his weight and they skitter out from beneath him. It looks almost like he’s dancing – he had danced, when they were children, a skipping sort of dance – except that his mouth suddenly narrows into something almost normal; normal enough to frown. At Dan’s other side, Nicky drapes his arm across her shoulder and crouches to say, conversationally, to her ear. “He couldn’t even destroy it.”

Joining them, Allison tosses her curtain of golden hair and laughs a long line of throat, preening. “Didn’t even conquer it a little bit.”

Riko snarls and roars at them, lunging, but never close enough to strike – it doesn’t help that, the longer they go on all but ignoring him, the more his frame shrinks down to nearly human scale. He’s still got the eight backwards-jointed legs of an arachnid and a face that opens more like a whirlpool than a mouth, but he’s barely twice Matt’s height now. When he tries to snap at them he almost can’t reach over the width of his own frame.

“You got yourself some nowhere town that nobody’s ever heard of in some backwoods state,” he doesn’t look Riko in the eyes, but he looks like he does – it’s enough. Another staticky change in the air, and it brings him down to nearly Matt’s level, if not an inch or two shorter. All too easy for him to reach out and place a large hand in the center of what would be Riko’s chest, and _shove_.

He stumbles into Kevin. “And you _still_ couldn’t beat up some fucking kids who lived there,” he matches Neil’s sneer with one of his own, expressions they’ve learned from each other and honed to knife points over their years on the court.

“You’re pathetic,” Neil spits the words out at him, and turns his back.

It seems only fitting, that Renee is the last one to confront him – this all began with her, too. She looks down (and _down_ ) to the quivering mess of a creature that is now slumped at their feet. “You’re a fucking _clown_.”

And then he is, nothing but a clown, small and weak – his skin is white and cracking beneath the paint, and his hair is lank and greasy, and his drawn on smile is comical against the gasping, ragged frown of his breathing. He glances between the seven of them with something like terror drawing him thin and worn like an old portrait, and then, finally, his whistling noises of panic dim like the light fading from his sallow, yellow eyes.

With a final, ragged gasp, he opens an all-too-human mouth and exhales three small burps of light; they quiver in the air over his head until, one by one, they go out.

Riko dies much like he’d lived in the underbelly of their town for centuries – with only their group ever knowing about it.

* * *

When they scramble back down the slope to the smaller cave, Aaron is sitting cross-legged beside Andrew, holding his hand gently. The wound in his stomach has stopped bleeding, and a jacket that looks to have been one of theirs before this all started is torn to strips, the bandage wrapped around him tightly. The fence post, still bloody, is near his feet. That, more than anything else, is what has Neil dragging himself into a halt long before he reaches them. “You’re not supposed to take it out,” his voice sounds plaintive, even to his own ears, and Aaron shoots to his feet at the sound of it. “When someone gets stabbed.”

In their entire lives, before and after the years that were stolen from them, Aaron has never once hugged him. He does now, pulling Neil into a tight, desperate hug that feels just familiar enough to keep him from pulling away. “Neil,” he starts, and his voice sounds raw.

“You said when someone gets stabbed you’re supposed to leave it in.” He knows why it is, knows from movies or science class or his childhood, he’s not sure which anymore, knows you leave it in to prevent the wound from bleeding out. Knows that Aaron would know this, even as a pediatrician. What he doesn’t know, or does, is why he’s suddenly done exactly that.

Another hand touches Neil, this time on the shoulder. It feels like Kevin. “Neil,” another voice, the same sort of tight and desperate as the hug that Aaron refuses to let go of, and then more and more as the others slowly enfold him into their arms. He knows they’re doing it to protect him, to comfort him, but what he doesn’t know – he _does_ know. He’s known it from the moment Andrew let him turn his back and walk into battle without him. – is what they’re protecting him from.

And then, when he opens his eyes and realizes the pain in his knees is not from age but from the sharp edges of the loose shale digging into them from where he’s dropped to the floor at some point without noticing, he does.

Andrew’s not bleeding anymore, or hissing his tiny noises of pain anymore, and Neil wants to say that he’s fine but he can’t – there’s a pressure in his chest that has nothing to do with the memories of old wounds and everything to do with what was there before, and it _hurts._ It feels like glass in his throat, feels like he’s screamed himself rough and hoarse for hours and then, suddenly, he realizes it’s because he _is_.

“Neil,” Aaron is still plastered to him like a second shadow, but he’s not holding him anymore. He’s pushing him, pressing him backwards, towards the others and the rope and the way out and— “Neil,” over the roar of his ears and the falling rocks of the cave around them, he can finally make out words. “Neil, we need to _go_ , we have to—”

They want to leave him here.

“I’m not leaving,” he says mulishly, but it comes out more of a croak than as actual words; there’s still too much of him left gaping and bare behind him, tossed carelessly into the air through sounds of anguish, to even consider it. “Not without Andrew.”

None of them want to be the one who says it, that Andrew is—

Neil knows what he is.

“I’m not leaving,” he says again, and he drops back to the ground beside Andrew. The hand that he grasps in his own does not pull away, nor does it squeeze his hand in return – it’s a hand he knows well, but it’s no longer Andrew’s.

“Please,” it’s a low blow, the way Renee turns her pleading on him. “Neil, please. The caverns are collapsing, we need to get out.”

It’s not until Kevin wraps his arms bodily around Neil’s torso, the way he does with Amalia when she used to throw tantrums, or when she has a total meltdown in public, that he thinks about fighting them. “I’m not leaving him,” he snarls, spits, fights like a wild animal – he knows, objectively, that this impossible place beneath the earth can no longer survive without the demon who sustained it, that the caverns and caves and probably even the tunnels are collapsing inward. Like black holes. Old stars grown too heavy on their own weight until they fold in on themselves. Andrew had spent a whole summer researching black holes, back when they were kids, and—

Later, he will feel terribly selfish for the way he’s oblivious to the others’ griefs. The way he hasn’t noticed Aaron and Nicky folding in on themselves like black holes of their own sorrow, unable to escape. The terrible hollowness in Renee’s eyes that wasn’t even there after Robin, because losing her had been too unfathomable to process, but losing Andrew is tragically, horrifically, _real_. The way Matt and Dan and Kevin all choke back their own noises of sadness to try and corral the others to the rope, to bully them up the rise, because they’re the only ones who have kept enough of their heads to know that if they don’t do this one thing, there will be more than just one of them lost today.

Instead, all he can see is the way that Andrew’s chest hasn’t risen or fallen once in the entire time he’s been down here. His eyes haven’t opened, or closed, and his jaw hasn’t twitched. How there’s nothing left of him that’s _Andrew_ , just a too-pale face and a stomach wound that no longer bleeds, and—

“You can’t leave me,” he finally whispers, and he hates how he now knows how painful Andrew’s last moments were – being impaled, he thinks, feels exactly like this. Like seeing your heart, or at least the person who carries it, lying cold and dead on a cave floor. “I just got you back, you aren’t supposed to—” The hands that grab him now, gentle, are not Kevin’s. When he blinks away the tears that have finally given themselves permission to fall, it’s to the split second shock of a familiar face in his vision; Aaron touches his arm, his cheeks, like he knows how hard it is to look at him.

“Neil,” he sounds just as gutted. “We have to.”

They do. He doesn’t.

“No, we don’t.” It sounds ridiculous, even to his ears, but he’s beyond the point of caring about any of this – he’s had his mother stolen from him by the evil that haunted this town, had half his life taken, and now—

Now this.

“We can’t leave him, because he’s not supposed to leave me like this.” It doesn’t even make sense to them, really, his dogged refusal to leave Andrew’s side – Aaron might get, but the only thing they had ever really had in common was the way they were two satellites caught in the same man’s orbit. In the end, it’s Aaron he looks to for help. “Rule of magic, right? Andrew doesn’t die down here, because _I don’t believe he does_.”

Aaron’s eyes are sad, and his face is grim. “Neil,” His face is grim, and his voice is soft. “It... it doesn’t work that way.”

“It _does_ ,” he argues, or tries to, but he’s too tired for it by then. He wishes violently, desperately, that he’d left town that first night, just turned tail and _run_ , because then when his five years were up and an accident claimed his life, he wouldn’t need to know what it felt like to outlive Andrew. Maybe, if he doesn’t leave now, he won’t have to. “I’ve _decided_. Andrew doesn’t die today.” The words are snatched from him like the hands that drag him forcibly from the altar of his own making, too rough and too tender by halves, and then are drowned out entirely by the roof as it caves in.

The trees thin and Neil can see the sweeping turn of where the dirt road turns into the steel and wood of the bridge out of town and—

And he knows without knowing exactly how, knows without any shadow of any doubt, that this is the last time he’ll ever cross it.

It feels different now, the idea of leaving. It always felt so much like running away – running away from his father, or maybe just his memory. Running away when he lost his mother and had nowhere else to go. Running away from monsters, from death, fear-based and frantic. Running away at eighteen, at nineteen, and neither one sticking. Running away at twenty and forgetting it all. Running away because it’s all he’s wanted to do since they got back here, because staying here meant feeling it all and he thinks maybe that’s what he’s been running from the whole time: the way Palmetto might have felt like dying slowly, but at least it felt like being alive.

Now it, the town and the leaving of it, feels less like running away and more like simply moving on.

It’s finally time, he thinks. To move on.

Riko had died, small and pathetic and alone, and the cavern had collapsed around them, and they had clawed their tired, broken, mourning bodies to the surface like they were digging themselves free of their own graves, and they had watched the sunrise together. It had been blood red. Somehow it was that, more than anything else, that convinced them it was finally over.

They had watched the sun rise and they had watched the dust settle, and when they had finally gathered the strength to stand they had walked back, leaning on each other, into a town they had never seen before in their lives.

There had been birds in the trees, songbirds, the kinds they’d never seen before, warbling a friendly symphony of tender, unfamiliar calls. There had been blossoms in the trees, the ones they thought had been long dead. Families in the streets, laughing, ducking into shops along Main Street and skipping children between linked hands in the soft Saturday glow. There had been warmth, and happiness, and something entirely foreign to them. It had felt _safe_. The evil was gone, its malignance cut from the history of the town like a cancer, and Palmetto was nothing more than a small community in a forgotten part of the country, surviving the only way it knew how: by moving on.

It was a strange, syrupy sort of departure. Renee had packed whatever belongings she couldn’t bear to part with into the trunk of Allison’s car, and she had bid Stephanie and the diner and the girl who haunted the hearts of all three a tearful, see-you-later sort of goodbye. Wymack hadn’t even bothered to put his house on the market, waving it off as something one of the neighbors would manage for him, before making the arrangements to have his possessions meet him out in California; he promised that he would be moved out there and into a place before Thea even went into labor, all too eager to catch up on the years of grandfathering he had missed. Neil hadn’t bothered to go to the cemetery. He’d thought about it, started the walk more than once, but ultimately decided against it – it was just as easy to bid farewell to his mother’s memory back home.

In the end, they’d all gathered back at the House to collect their bags and settle their bills, and then they’d piled themselves into their series of cars and promised that this time they wouldn’t forget, and then they’d left Palmetto and everything it had taken from them growing smaller in their rearview mirrors.

“Pull over.”

Neil doesn’t even realize he’s spoken the command aloud until Kevin does, pulling their car into the patch of dirt that sits perpetually clear of scrub brush and marks the mouth of the path to The Bridge. He doesn’t turn off the engine, but he _does_ put the car into park. “Remember your bachelor party?” Neil starts, tentatively. It’s been all too difficult for him to get any words out, ever since— Well. It’s not even an injury so much as it just _hurts_ , the way his throat still remembers how it feels to scream his heart right out of his chest. “You spent three hours afterward drunk crying on my couch about how much you loved Thea but she was too good for you and you made me promise to never mention it again?”

Kevin isn’t grinning, but he isn’t quite glaring either. “Sure do. Thanks for mentioning it again.”

“I only bring it up,” and the words come a little bit easier now. Some things are always going to be painful, but he’s long since learned how to live with his scars. “Because this is about to be _my_ ‘never mention it again’ story. Now we’re even.” And then he opens the door and slides from the car, and he starts the hike to The Bridge.

It’s even older and smaller looking, now that their last bit of childhood has been left behind; he looks at it with the practiced eye of a forty year old, looks at how the roof is in danger of blowing off in the next storm and how the struts that support it all have a terrifying mix of insect and element damage. He doesn’t look at the years and years of carvings and drawings, mostly because he doesn’t need to. He knows where he’s going.

“It was the summer after,” he crouches down on the balls of his feet, resting his elbows on his knees, “when we were fourteen, and—” It’s not flashy or fancy, the small carving tucked away at the very end, right where the plywood and warning signs urge any who approach of a dangerous fall. It’s not particularly large, either, and it’s faded to the same blackish-brown of the rest of the wood back here, hidden in shadow and damp. But Neil finds it easily and unerringly, tapping his fingers against the small D+A that Kevin can’t help but notice, know that he knows what to look for. “I think I must have already been starting to forget the whole Riko thing, because I really thought carving Drew plus Abram into this fucking bridge meant that we would be together forever.”

Kevin doesn’t make fun of him, or even do much of anything at all. He stands in protective silence between Neil and the world, and he finally lays a quiet hand against the top of Neil’s head, petting his hair. “You were in love with him,” he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t need to, not anymore.

A fragile silence and then Neil sighs, defeated and disgusted. “I still am.”

It was a feeling that Neil hadn’t even know he was missing, right until the moment Renee’s voice in his ear reminded him, and then it didn’t matter that it had been twenty years and an entirely new lifetime. It didn’t matter that whoever they had grown into, they had grown entirely and irreparably apart. It didn’t even matter that up until that exact moment he had never once given thought as to why he never once gave thought to anything or anyone of the like. All that mattered was that Renee had said _Palmetto_ and in between one staggering heartbeat and the next, before he even remembered the fact that he had forgotten his entire fucking life, Neil remembered that he had been in love with Andrew Joseph Minyard since they were twelve years old.

There’s an abrupt, agonized puff of air from Kevin when he realizes what this all means, realizes the weight of everything Neil carried up from the sewers, and the hand in his hair moves down to his shoulder where the other one mirrors on the other side to squeeze painfully. “Jesus, Neil,” he breathes, voice not quite wet sounding, but a little bit damp. It’s something anybody but Thea or Neil have ever been in a position to learn, but of all of them it’s always been Kevin who was the closet romantic. “Does… shit, _did_ ,” the hands clenched at his shoulders release to pat him awkwardly, then clench again as his voice turns to a whisper. “Did he know?”

“Of course I fucking knew.”

Andrew’s gruff voice is infinitely gruffer with the exertion of conquering the few hundred feet from the car unassisted; Neil hadn’t thought that he would come. It had only been the last twenty-four hours where he’d managed getting himself to his feet without pulling the stitches in his gut so painfully that it drove him back down, and while he loathed the wheelchair the hospital had sent him home in he’d used it more often than not as he’d gotten around. They were expecting him to graduate to crutches, or a cane, in the coming days or weeks as he slowly regained his strength, as his body learned to work around the gaping canyon of core muscles trying to knit themselves back together, but until then it was the team effort of Kevin and Neil _and_ Matt to get him into the backseat to begin with. Neil isn’t entirely sure how they’re going to manage this time, now that Andrew has undone all of their hard work to follow them.

He doesn’t have the strength to shoulder Kevin out of the way, but he moves anyway; Andrew takes over the perch at Neil’s back and the light touch at his hair, but his body sags forward with the effort. Another second or two and the hand retreats, curling in to his stomach to press against a gasping inhale, where it still hurts to even breathe without the added compression helping his now diminished lungs along. The other hand fishes in the pocket of his sweatshirt and emerges victoriously with a pocketknife, which he taps against Neil’s cheek to get his attention.

Neil hums a soft noise of thanks and opens the blade, taking it to the faded carving until it’s bold and readable again. “You should probably sit down,” he finally says, casually, like he hasn’t just laid himself bare.

“You should probably shut the fuck up,” Andrew snarls back, or tries to; his skin is paler than ever and his eyes are blown wide and dark with pain, and there’s a tremor in his body where he leans as much of his weight as he can against Neil’s. “If I sit down I don’t think I’ll be able to get back up.”

The letters look better now, freshly carved and touched up with a practiced hand. He’d been nervous, as a teen, scratching a promise that felt so much larger than himself into the world like this. Now it doesn’t feel nearly as frightening. “Ask Kevin if he’ll carry you,” Neil leans back slightly to check his handiwork, and goes back in for a sharper curve to the D – they might be leaving this town to never come back, but they were here. He wants them to remember that they were here. “I’m sure as hell not going to.”

A sharp, seal-like sort of noise ends in a drawn out groan of agony as Andrew, apparently, attempts to laugh; the smile tugs at his face in much the same way it seems his stitches pull at the rest of him – painfully, but easily. “Fuck you.” The words are fond and familiar, said in a way that anyone else would form a nickname, or an endearment. It’s always been that way between them. “I want a divorce.”

Another bark of laughter as Neil finishes with his task and slowly rises, letting Andrew gratefully lean against him; his face ends up pressed against the back of Neil’s neck, tucked into the space between his shoulder blades. The newly cleaned up carving sits about thigh level. “Good luck returning me without a receipt,” he slings an arm under Andrew’s, helping him with the slow, painful walk back across The Bridge, toward the car. Toward leaving.

Kevin doesn’t immediately follow them, and then he does. “What the _fuck_ ,” he takes Andrew’s other side, hooking an arm under Andrew’s shoulder and taking most of the weight. “What the _actual fuck_ you guys?”

They share an entire conversation with the glance between them, but neither goes to explain; it’s a story they’ve never known how to start, mostly because they were already well into the middle before they had any idea it was being told.

(He finally twisted his body in a way where he could sit up, and he framed Andrew’s face with his hands. “You’re gay,” he repeated, and didn’t look away. “You’re not sick, or evil, or wrong.”

Andrew blinked and was himself again, jagged and prickly. “Whatever,” he shrugged Neil’s hands off his cheeks, but he didn’t shift away. “You gonna freak out about it now?”

He laughed suddenly, and reached out to cup the back of Andrew’s neck again. “Why? Because my best friend is gay?” Aside from the talk around town he mostly ignored and the lingering talk on the television about the AIDS crisis, there has never been much said about gay people where Neil could hear it. All he knew for sure is that, after everything they had gone through, he had seen what made people evil and love could never be it. “Drew… I stabbed a clown through the fucking head for you. I don’t think there’s anything that could freak me out at this point.”

Andrew tilted his head, considering. Smiled that jagged, prickly grin he did before he started a fight. Threw the words like a punch. “What if I told you it was you?”

Neil didn’t understand. “That it was me… that _I’m_ gay?”

The hammock shook violently, nearly throwing Neil to the tight-packed dirt of the floor; Andrew smirked at him, unrepentant. “You’re so fucking stupid,” but the words were laden heavy with fondness – it was how they were with each other. Jagged and prickly, but inseparable. Had been since kindergarten, since long before they’d faced down death together in a dank sewer. “No, what if I told you that you’re how I know.”

It took a moment for the words to process; Neil wasn’t stupid, not by far, but there was definitely something about the way he connected with people – or didn’t – that sometimes seemed like it. And then he got it, and then he _grinned_. “It’s the shorts,” he wound the words between his teeth, cheeks pulled taught and tight against fresh scars, “isn’t it. You’re always checking out my ass in these shorts.”

The hammock shook again, and Andrew tried to help it along by kicking at Neil’s hips. “Fuck you,” but the snarl was more like a laugh, bright and unburdened. They had been that way all summer, ever since— Like suddenly, for the first time, they could breathe. “Don’t make me have this conversation. I’m gay, this is supposed to be all about me.”

“Sorry,” Neil grinned, looking and sounding anything but, “you’re right.” And his smile did soften then, in a way it so rarely did with them, because Neil and Andrew might be something but whatever is was wasn’t _soft_. “Thanks though,” and even his voice was softer, almost hesitant. “For telling me. I’m— I’m proud of you.”

A roll of his eyes and a noise of disgust greeted the sentiment, and Andrew reached out again to kick at Neil’s side – this time was less about accuracy and more about digging his toes into whatever part of Neil’s ribcage he could find. “I hate you,” he growled fiercely. Fondly.

Neil didn’t buy a word of it, but he did stretch a knee across Andrew’s thighs. “Really? Because like two seconds ago you were gay for me.”

He did kick Neil with intention for that, and nearly from the hammock entirely; it was a near thing, the way it scraped and squeaked against its ceiling tethers, as the hammock itself nearly came apart along with it. “Changed my mind,” he finally snarled in disgust, glaring around the tangle of canvas and rope and Neil they’d gotten themselves into, “I’m straight now. I love tits.”

“I don’t.”

It was nothing Neil had ever thought of, except for the way he hadn’t thought of it – sure, he had gone through a lot over the summer, but he had been thirteen for far longer than he’d been traumatized and he’d never thought of it before either. He knew that Matt was obsessed with Dan, knew that Kevin had a pile of magazines hidden under his bed, knew that sometimes Allison looked at Nicky a little too long when they stripped down to their underwear at the river. He knew that other thirteen years old had thoughts, or urges, or whatever the fuck they had taught them in school back in fifth grade. He knew all of this because he knew that, despite spending nearly all of his time with a series of humans that were objectively attractive across all levels and also unquestionably loved him, he had never once cared about any of it enough to wonder. “I don’t think about girls that way,” he tried to explain, “or boys either. Or anyone, I guess.”

Andrew’s eyes were bright and kind, and his voice was dark and jagged. “You don’t need to,” he was angry. Earnest. There were very few things that Andrew believed in, but nearly all of them were _choice_. “It’s okay to just… not, or whatever.”

“I don’t know what I’m into,” Neil admitted, because he didn’t. He had never once thought about a girl, or a boy, in any capacity beyond those he considered his family, and the rest of the world. He had never once understood the way the others whispered or winked or blushed sometimes, the way they danced around each other or the other kids at school like it was a complex pattern he couldn’t yet see. All he knew was that he knew enough about himself to be aware of all of this, and that he never felt butterflies or wildfires or anything in any part of him, but that there was something in his chest that howled a little bit at the thought of one day losing Andrew to anyone else. Or maybe it was that he thought that Andrew was _his_ to begin with, or the way they gravitated toward each other like their worlds only knew how to exist together, or the way that when Neil had thought he was going to die the only regret he’d had was that Andrew had been too far away for him to touch, or the fact that he wanted to touch him at all. Neil had never had an urge but he always had an _ache_ , and the only time he didn’t feel it was when he was with Andrew, and—

Their hands were already tangled together, and so were their legs and pretty much their entire lives. In that exact moment in time, Neil wondered if maybe he’d never thought about it because he never _had_ to. That maybe he’d already figured it out. “But I’m pretty sure I’m into you.”)

(They were sixteen when Neil finally gave voice to the screaming in his chest, the one that wasn’t the horror of an old house or even the demon beneath, but something far more primal. The one that roiled in his gut like a turbulent ocean, dashed ships against his ribs, hurled shrapnel onto the shores of his heart and— And Neil had always known that love was a perfect storm, sure to kill him, but he could never have imagined that it was also this: facing the worst of it head on, and finding calm seas and safe harbors on the other side.

“I love you,” he told the steady, sleepy weight of Andrew against his back; he’d rolled across the gap of mattress between them to burrow against Neil’s spine, face tucked into the space between his shoulder blades. The breaths that were too soft for snores but too heavy for anything else stirred the hairs at the back of his neck, and the arm that slung low across his hips did not move. They spent more nights together in Neil’s bed then they didn’t, now that Neil had no adult left to really care what he did with his time or his body, and mostly that Aaron had finally started to complain.

“I love you,” he told the space at his side that had somehow, unquestionably, become Andrew’s; nevermind that he wasn’t currently in it, because he had been more often than not over the last eleven years of their lives. There was a stretched out, hollow feeling to the way there was no one there now, even though they didn’t, contrary to popular opinion, do everything together. It had nothing to do with the occupancy and everything to do with the way it was only his absence that Neil was able to confess to, brave in the face of every danger but this.

“I love you,” he told the soft, shocked _o_ of Andrew’s lips, drawn into softness with his surprise; it matched the similar slack-jawed expression when Neil realized what he’d said, which was miles and miles from what he intended to. The words hung in the too-small space between them like the fog over the river – all-encompassing, and ominous. He reached a hand out like he could snatch them back, but instead hovered his fingers around the stone barrier of Andrew’s chest, of the fortress walls he so rarely retreated behind.

Slowly, deliberately, Andrew reached out and tangled their fingers together. “You stabbed a clown through the fucking head for me, Neil,” he echoed the reminder of all those years ago, when he’d heard it for the confession it was. “You think I don’t know?”)

(They were eighteen and stupid, drunk on flat beer but mostly each other, and they didn’t let the sympathetic Maryland judge deter them when he told them, regretfully, that it wouldn’t technically be legal. They didn’t exchange rings but they did promises, echoes of oaths sworn in blood and sealed in the legend of a bridge with their names dug into its foundations, meaning forever in the way only people who have fought death and won the right to carry on could understand.)

(They were twenty and the speed Neil took from the track to the court, having joined Kevin’s exy team at the community college across the river, finally drew the attention of the professional scouts. Four teams were vying for him but he held out for the one that would also sign Kevin, and he kept leaving print outs of available dogs from animal shelters across the country where Andrew could find them.

They were twenty and the pages Andrew sent to the publishers came back with more and more notes as less and less people read them, finally coming back with nothing at all. A woman called their landline one day with a litany of praise for the story he’d wrung from the terrors they’d survived and begged for the exclusivity of his contract, and he stapled the amount they were willing to offer him to a picture of a sad, soft looking mutt up in Baltimore.

They were twenty and they’d spent every day of the last fifteen years together and every night of last seven, and three weeks apart was _nothing_ when they’d already lasted through hell and beyond. Andrew kissed Neil one last time against the chipped counters of the apartment they had mostly moved out of and told him to call when he landed, and again when he got to wherever it was that the Timberwolves were putting him up, and he called him a cab.

He was twenty and Andrew woke up the next morning in his new place in Baltimore and he couldn’t put his finger on any cause to the nagging feeling at the back of his mind that something was missing, but he figured it was something he’d inadvertently left behind in the move. He went to call his brother to see if it could be retrieved before he remembered that he hated him, that he had _always_ hated him, and he went back to bed instead.

He woke up again and the feeling wasn’t quite gone, not all the way, but it didn’t bother him anymore. A few hours later, he had forgotten it entirely.)

(They’re forty and they answer a call to an unknown number reminding them of a promise, and they remember a different one entirely.

Andrew stands in the kitchen of the Baltimore apartment he’s never quite known why he didn’t want to leave and he stares at the running shoes that are orange and electric blue that he’s never known why he wanted to buy, and he remembers very suddenly being five and ten and thirteen and sixteen and eighteen and twenty and remembers how he’s never hated his brother and that he has always, _always_ loved Neil.

Neil sinks to the floor of the Sacramento house he’s never bothered adding any personal touches to and he glances at the newspaper spread on the breakfast table and he thinks that there’s something in there about the dog he was supposed to have, and he blinks his eyes exactly once and he remembers that the vows he exchanged twenty-two years ago might not have been legal then, but they could be now.)

(They’re forty and they see each other for the first time in twenty years across the table of a Chinese restaurant, and they don’t say hello. They never said goodbye, either – it’s not their way. They see each other across the room and Andrew raises his eyebrow like a question, and Neil curls his lip like an answer.)

(They’re forty and they’re walking with their friends to the diner, and Andrew has promised to buy Neil waffles because they’re probably going to die. The sky has clouds like it always does, and the air feels sour like it always does, and Palmetto is a town rotting from the inside out, and they haven’t spoken yet about the two decade gap in their lives together; instead, Andrew wears the shoes that are exactly the color of Neil’s hair and his eyes, and also a sweatshirt that he stole from Neil’s duffle while he was in the shower. Instead, Neil lets his elbows brush against the presence at his side that has been missing for far too long, and also his fingers when Andrew takes one step closer or walks one step slower.)

(They’re forty and Andrew is a bestselling author and Neil is a professional athlete and they have lives on opposite sides of the country and two decades of adulthood erasing whatever they might once have been, and they don’t talk about it.

Instead, in the few hours of time they’re apart as the group scours past and present for their tokens, Neil ducks into the general store and, after a moment of decision, he purchases a cat collar. He ends up in line behind Andrew who, shrugging, gestures for him to add the purchase to his already identical one.

Apparently, if they survive this, they’re getting two.)

Andrew shrugs, and Neil grins. “We used to drive Aaron _insane_.”

It was never a conscious decision, the way they never announced their relationship. Aaron knew because he shared a room with one, or both, of them for a good portion of their early teen years, but otherwise they had never felt the need to tell their friends; mostly, because they never thought it needed telling. They were AndrewandNeil, the space between where one began and the other ended folded into nothing by their friends long before they ever thought to do so themselves. But they’ve always been private people – for all that Neil rarely shuts the fuck up, it’s rarer still that he actually says anything of any weight, and Andrew was always least expressive about the things that meant most, protecting them behind the same walls he kept around himself. But Kevin has known them for thirty-five years and across two lifetimes each, and he crosses his eyes a little, looking between them, like he’s looking for some marker or sign that says explicitly what he’s only now piecing together and—

He grins, and then he laughs. “I think I just lost another bet.”

Neil and Andrew share a glance, and an entire silent conversation, as they reach the side of the rented car. “I don’t think you did.”

* * *

Crossing the state line feels very much like emerging from the dirt of the ruined house had – like cheating death. Like being reborn. By the time they pull into the parking lot of the diner in Baltimore they’d all agreed to meet in (Baltimore was only about an hour away, right across the river and a straight shot to the east, and maybe there were closer places for them to gather but it was also where Andrew lived, and had for the last twenty years. The general consensus was that, so soon out of his surgeries and hospital stay, he would be too tired for a second leg of a journey, and so they got him as close to home as they could: the familiar, 24-hour diner near his apartment, the one that he had frequented as a police officer and now sometimes sat in for hours as he wrote his books.), the aches and pains they’d acquired over their time in Palmetto seemed to have mostly faded. Andrew, of course, was still fragile and aching, but Neil and Kevin felt lighter than they had in _years_.

Maybe it was because they were alive. Or maybe, more likely, it was because they left the town and their childhoods behind them, and when they pulled into the parking lot an hour and a half later and saw their friends waiting for them, they still knew who they were.

“Is that Exy legend Kevin Day?” Nicky hollers across the entire distance between them, completely shameless. “What’s he doing all the way out here?” but there’s a grin on his face that means he knows exactly what he’s doing, and that whatever had stolen their lives away the second they crossed the bridge that first time had let them escape.

Dan kisses all three of them on the cheeks. It doesn’t matter that it’s been less than two hours since they parted, they’re all so giddy with the idea that this time, it seems, this is a thing they get to keep. “You guys are late, we were about to order without you.”

“Yeah, sorry we’re late.” He sounds nothing of the sort. He still sounds a little bit dazed, like he had the entire drive here where Neil and Andrew had stubbornly (with a shared grin when he wasn’t looking) refused to speak to him. “We had to detour to The Bridge for awhile so these two,” he gestures over-emphatically behind him, to where Neil is trying to convince Andrew to let him help get out of the car, “could declare their undying love for each other.”

Aaron throws back his head and cackles, soon mirrored by an equal crow of victory from Allison. “Twenty-five fucking years!” she screeches, drawing the attention of nearly everyone within earshot – of course it was a bustling city that ignored a blatant cry of attention toward anyone famous, but immediately latched on to any sign of a public drama. “I’m not only collecting my winnings, I’m collecting interest! Three-and-a-half percent, I _own you bitches_!”

It takes Andrew just about to the end of her wild, all but unholy shrieking to reach them; when he does, he meets his twin’s eyes across their rough circle and raising an eyebrow like a question mark. “What was the bet this time?”

No one bothers to look sheepish. “Oh,” Allison explains with delight, hooking her elbow through Andrew’s and allowing him to gratefully lean some of his weight against her, “it was a multi-level bet. The main portion was whether you two,” and she flicks a finger between him and Neil, almost like an accusation, “would finally get together. There’s a series of side bets for when, where, and how. _And_ ,” this time she’s back to screeching at the others, “since the rest of you suckers placed actual times like ‘this summer,’ ‘senior year,’ or ‘after graduation,’ I think the judges will find that my bet of ‘fucking _eventually_ ’ stands as the winner.”

The judges are, usually, whoever was unable to participate in the bet.

Andrew leans against Allison, and Neil slings an arm across Dan’s shoulders. “The judges find you are _not_ the winner,” Aaron informs her, grinning, without bothering to consult with the others, and when the hooting of the others and the noises of disdain from Allison reach their zenith – there might be a lot of Andrew and Aaron in each other’s manners, but there’s an awful lot of Neil as well – he continues, drawing it out for maximum effect. “Since all wagered guesses for ‘when will Andrew and Neil finally get together?’ included events in the future.”

She glares. “It _is_ the future.”

Neil offers one last grin, the same sharp expression that he learned from his father and honed on his foes, and starts leading Dan into the diner. “Yeah, but you guys made the bet like a year after we’d already started dating. You all lose.”

This time, the shrieking and yelling from the others has nothing to do with a victory.

“So,” he smiles at Dan, who looks surprised, but not nearly as surprised as the others – she was one of the few who had known them both from the very beginning, after all. Neil and Andrew might not have been NeilandAndrew back in kindergarten, not yet, but they had been a collective unit since the day they met, when Andrew had punched Neil in the stomach and then Neil had punched Andrew in the face, and by the time they’d come out of the time-out corner nearly ten minutes later they had cemented an unshakable bond that had only grown with time. “You and Matt?”

Her face goes soft at the mention of his name, the same way Neil has noticed is has every time for the last week. “Yeah,” she confirms, and Neil pulls her tighter against him in a hug.

“This is literally the best thing that ever happened to me,” he tells her, seriously.

She tries to look stern, but there’s too much of a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eye – she radiates happiness, brighter than anything that came out of that town should allow, and he burns with how pleased he is for them both. “Neil,” her voice cracks into a grin with her lips, “we went to the Olympics like... four times. And won.”

“And this is still the best. Hey Drew!” he calls back over his shoulder while Dan leads them to the back corner, where the largest booth – which still isn’t large enough. It’s meant to seat six maybe, not nine, but they’ve never been shy sharing tight quarters int heir group. They manage to squish and squeeze themselves in and, when the waitress comes by, her nose wrinkles in joy to see their group of adults elbowing each other into position like a group of children. – wraps the wall like a horseshoe. “We’re rich!”

The message is passed back to Andrew, bringing up the rear of their group with Allison still helping him make a slow pace after them, by Aaron, and then Renee, calling it over their own shoulders like a game of telephone. “We already were,” somehow the message returns with his exact flavor of sarcasm, so familiar that Neil waits for the others to press into their booth so he can sit at the end, right beside Andrew. “But go on.”

Allison is on Neil’s other side. “Summer of ’96, after you and Seth got together, we all made a bet who the next ones of us to hook up would be. I think I’m safe in assuming you all guessed me and Drew?” It’s mostly nods that greet his question, though Aaron just shrugs – he’s always abstained from bets relating to his brother’s personal life, arguably because of an otherwise unheard of ‘sibling clause’ that their group of largely comprised only children wouldn’t have been able to refute, but mostly because for all he complained about them and their relationship, he never would have discussed it without their permission. “Well, we bet Matt and Dan. Pay up, bitches.”

* * *

Eventually, it comes time to leave.

Most of them have dropped everything and put their lives on hold to return to the hometown they’d forgotten, leaving behind families and careers and unanswered questions that are all too quickly piling up in their wake. Soon will come the time to make excuses, or maybe explanations (Neil already knows Kevin will tell Thea everything, just like he knows that, despite everything, she will believe it), and any changes that might come about from suddenly regaining an entire half of their lives, and all of who they were. Soon will come their all too public returns to their various spotlights.

But right now, at the end of today, all there is is each other. They cling to the family they’ve been building since they were children, the one that lasted through adolescence and adulthood and incalculable loss. With a smile and a joke, both of which fall flat, Nicky makes a new group chat in his phone and sends them all the group selfie he snaps of them in the booth. “To keep in touch,” he tells them shyly, but they all hear what he actually means.

To remember.

They’ve lasted this long, but they’ve also been together; they drove up from Palmetto in twos and threes, no one wanting to spend even an hour alone at that point, and had been all but attached at the hips or elbows or knees ever since. Of _course_ they remember – for now. But all too soon and growing sooner will come the time for Dan to fly back to her team, and Neil and Kevin to theirs, and Aaron to Chicago, and Matt to New York, and Allison to Los Angeles, and Renee to wherever in the world she wants, and—

And maybe, once that happens, they could forget it all again.

They drag out the leaving until the last possible second, and they all send a few messages to the chat that could either be nothing, or could mean everything, and then—

Kevin hugs Neil so tightly he can feel it in his bones, long after he’s let go, and pops the truck of their rented car. “You better be back before Thea gives birth,” he scolds, and he transfers Neil’s duffel into the backseat of Nicky’s sedan. He’d offered to drop Andrew at his apartment on his way back to DC, and be back by the end of the week to help him recuperate. Originally, the plan had been for Renee to stay in the guest bedroom for the few days in between. “I’ll tell Coach you had a family emergency, it should buy you another week or two.”

Surprisingly, it’s Andrew who objects – weakly. He might not have done much more than sit and eat and listen today, but he still looks exhausted, like all of his energy has gone just to the act of still being alive. “I don’t recall inviting you to stay with me,” he glares, or tries to, but fails on the way his face breaks into a tired smile when Neil presses their lips together briefly.

“Don’t need to,” he also presses his hand against the stitches in Andrew’s stomach, supporting the movements of him climbing into the car. “I paid the security deposit, and I’m still on the lease. Seriously, Drew, you never noticed?”

He shrugs. “Could never find it. Never wanted to move, so it didn’t seem important.”

Soon enough finally comes, and they’re forced to leave. Allison and Dan drive to the airport together, with Matt and Aaron in the car following them; before the rest have ever left the parking lot there’s a series of photos and videos sent to their chat of the two cars discovering they’re next to each other at a red light. Then Renee and Nicky get into the front seats of the parked sedan, and Neil takes another second to say a goodbye of indeterminate length to the man who has been by his side for thirty-five years.

“Tell the girls I’ll see them soon,” Neil promises, though none of them are sure that he will – for all any of them know, Neil could wake up tomorrow with a new set of false memories tying him to Baltimore, or no memories at all. He thinks, _hopes_ , that even if they forget Palmetto, even if they forget Riko and the caverns and the battlefield of a childhood that led them here, he and Kevin will still have each other. After all, they’d managed to find each other again in their second lives, build themselves a family from there. He might open his eyes tomorrow and never again remember the others, but he’s fairly certain he’ll still remember Kevin. “I’ll be back before the baby gets here.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” Kevin promises in return, and they both know that he will.

And then, tempting fate and the universe and whatever magics had already shaped so much of their time together, Neil and Kevin say their first intentional goodbye of their lives.

* * *

Neil wakes up the morning after a day that felt like a week, and a week that felt like a month, in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room with the unfamiliar weight of a body at his back. He wakes quickly and takes stock slowly, and then he rolls over onto his stomach to watch the rise and fall of Andrew’s breathing.

He remembers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I know that I am, technically, a sports reporter, but there’s no sports happening in the foreseeable future and there is no possible way I can care about Exy right now with the increasingly dramatic, and equally implausible, story I’m being told.) **Well, that sounds... wild. I can’t wait to see what you all get up to on your next visit home.**  
>  K: There’s not going to be a next time  
> N: We can... literally never go back there  
> K: Like... Literally  
> N: We’re banished or whatever  
> K: He killed a dude in the library
> 
> (I wait for the punchline. The longer we sit in an increasingly uncomfortable silence, the more I begin to suspect it’s not coming.)
> 
> N: I literally killed a dude with an ancient Native American artifact in the middle of the library. There was a whole trial. This didn’t make the news?  
> K: I feel like it did  
> Male voice, off-screen: Ryan Lochte was on the national news for two weeks and all he did was file a false police report  
> K: It’s like, the first Google result when I search your name. ‘Charges dropped in Neil Josten self-defense murder trial,’ Kelly how did you not hear about this?
> 
> (I’m stunned. I’m absolutely floored. Of course I heard about it, but it was never front page – trust a global pandemic to cover up the most sensational sports story of 2020 – and it never quite seemed, well, real. I’ve been interviewing these two for nearly eight years now and, today aside, they’ve always been the kindest, most normal men who happened to also be sports superstars.) **I thought it was… I don’t know, a joke?**  
>  N: Who jokes about murdering someone  
> Male voice, off-screen: Literally you  
> K: All the time  
> N: Okay, fair  
> K: But yeah, that happened  
> N: In my defense, he was an escaped serial killer and he did stab Andrew in the face like thirty minutes before this happened  
> K: Totally justified
> 
> (So Neil Josten and Kevin Day and a few other staggeringly famous people have all been friends their entire lives. So they killed an escaped serial killer during their twenty-year reunion. This is fine.)
> 
>  **So…** (There’s no hope for any of us to get on track, not after all of this. I’ve already resigned myself to the least professional interview of my career.) **I don’t know, the Olympics?**  
>  K: 2021, we’ll be there  
> N: _You’ll_ be there  
> K: Neil is retiring at the end of the season  
> N: Given the way it’s looking, I might just be retired at this point  
> K: Mazel tov  
> N: Thanks, I love being an unemployed trophy husband and full-time cat dad  
> K: You deserve it
> 
> (The interview ends rather quickly after that, but not before Neil – and Andrew Minyard slash AJ Spear, who he is apparently quarantining with in Baltimore – spend another few minutes admiring baby Deanna, Kevin reveals, middle name Natalie.)  
> N, softly: You named her after me?  
> K: Of course. I love you, Neil  
> N: I love you, Kev  
> A: We named our cats after you, Kevin  
> K: F— you, Andrew
> 
> (I don’t ask.)


End file.
